Level Playing Fields: the Democratization of Amateur Sport in Pennsylvania
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LEVEL PLAYING FIELDS: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF AMATEUR SPORT IN PENNSYLVANIA by W. CURTIS MINER B.A., INDIANA UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1984 M.A., UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, 1989 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2006 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by W. Curtis Miner It was defended on 11/20/2006 and approved by Kathleen M. Blee, Professor, Department of Sociology Laurence Glasco, Associate Professor, Department of History Van Beck Hall, Associate Professor, Department of History Dissertation Advisor: Edward K. Muller, Professor, Department of History ii Copyright © by W. Curtis Miner 2006 iii Level Playing Fields: The Democratization of Amateur Sport in Pennsylvania W. Curtis Miner, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2006 This dissertation examines how amateur sports once dominated and controlled by Pennsylvania’s Leisure Class became accessible to non-elites over the course of the twentieth century. Rising standards of living and increased leisure time were pre-requisites for broader public participation. But this study argues that the democratization of amateur sport depended on the active intervention of the state and, to a lesser extent, the market, both of which broadened access to privately controlled playing fields. In hunting, state game management restored wild game populations, thus ensuring a bountiful supply of game for all Pennsylvanians, irrespective of social class. Likewise, the first municipally owned golf courses, often situated in public parks, offered the only alternative to the private courses which up to that point dominated the game and regulated participation. Finally, the market-driven demand for new sources of “football material” on college campuses opened opportunities for working-class student athletes, most of whom were recruited and subsidized by wealthy alumni. Many of these changes were set in motion by elites acting in their own self interest. Over time, though, the democratization of amateur sports became a goal in itself. During the 1910s, the state game commission shifted its emphasis from game propagation and game law enforcement to the acquisition of public game lands, a policy focus which benefited hunters without access to private property. In golf, a second wave of municipal courses, many billed as iv “people’s country clubs” and fortified by federal money, were designed to be accessible to the greatest number of people, and without the membership restrictions which obtained at many early public courses. While the social composition of amateur sports continued to expand after World War II, the market played an increasingly more visible role in that process, as evinced by growth of semi-public golf courses and the increased prevalence of leased or privately owned hunting grounds. Elites frequently responded to the “crowding of the playing fields” by retreating or refortifying boundaries within these same sports. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................IX 1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1 2 JOINING THE CHASE: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF SPORT HUNTING IN PENNSYLVANIA .............................................................................................................. 25 2.1 Sport and Subsistence: The Social Basis of Hunting in Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania........................................................................................................ 30 2.2 Gentlemen Sportsmen and Private Game Preserves in Pennsylvania........... 38 2.3 Game Laws and Social Class: The Early Years of The Pennsylvania Game Commission, 1895 - 1909 .................................................................................... 47 2.4 Preserving Hunting for the People: The Pennsylvania Game Commission and the Promotion of Public Hunting, 1909 - 1919.......................................... 59 2.5 From Sanctuaries to Shooting Grounds: The Evolution of Public Game Lands, 1919-1939 ................................................................................................ 74 2.6 “A Veritable Army of Annihilation”: The Increase in Recreational Hunters and the Democratization af Sport Hunting, 1915-1940................................... 87 2.7 The Working Man’s Hunting Club: Industrial Workers as Sport Hunters . 95 3 OPEN FAIRWAYS : THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF GOLF IN PENNSYLVANIA . ............................................................................................................................................ 109 vi 3.1 The Upper Four Hundred and the Front Nine: Golf and Pennsylvania’s Social Elites, 1887-1920 .................................................................................... 113 3.2 Landscaped Parks and the Origins of the Municipal Golf Movement, 1895- 1915..................................................................................................................... 133 3.3 Expanding the Fairways: Golf Reaches Out to the Masses, 1915-1925...... 149 3.4 “The People’s Country Clubs”: The Democratization of Public Golf and the Second Generation of Municipal Links .......................................................... 159 3.5 Golf’s New Deal: The Great Depression, the WPA and Municipal Golf.... 175 3.6 Blue-Collar Titlists: The Amateur Public Links Golf Championship, 1922- 1939..................................................................................................................... 184 3.7 The Golfing Steelworker: Andy Szwedko and the 1939 Amateur Public Links Championship......................................................................................... 192 4 GRIDIRONS AND IRON MEN: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL IN PENNSYLVANIA................................................................................ 196 4.1 Manly Brahmins: The Leisure Class, “Strenuousity” and College Football .. ............................................................................................................... 203 4.2 Gridirons and Local Elites: College Football at the University of Pittsburgh, 1904-1918 ........................................................................................................... 215 4.3 “Stadiumitis,” the Commercialization of College Football and the Search for “Football Material” .......................................................................................... 225 4.4 Noblesse Oblige and Football Farms: Private Prep Schools and the Cultivation of Working-Class Athletes, 1915-1930........................................ 232 vii 4.5 Steel Town High: Public High Schools and Western Pennsylvania Industrial Communities as Sources of Football Material ............................................... 249 4.6 Linking Supply With Demand: Systematic Recruiting and the Democratization of College Football............................................................... 272 4.7 Financing Supply: The Subsidization of Working-Class Athletes and the Democratization of College Football............................................................... 285 4.8 Bohunkus College: Democratization and the “New Ethnology” of College Football during the 1930s................................................................................. 292 5 EPILOGUE: FROM STATE TO MARKET: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF SPORT AND RECREATION IN PENNSYLVANIA AFTER WORLD WAR II..... 299 5.1 Semi-Publics and Industrial Courses: Private Sector Approaches to Public Golf..................................................................................................................... 303 5.2 Co-Ops and Clubs: The Public-Private Dimensions of Postwar Hunting. 315 5.3 Working-Class “Professionals,” Upper-Class Amateurs: The Social Bifurcation of College Football........................................................................ 327 5.4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 339 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................... 345 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I began graduate school as a traditional student but re-entered and now exit as a “non-traditional” one. I’ve accumulated debts on both ends, and in the middle. First thanks go to my committee members, Kathleen Blee, Larry Glasco and Van Beck Hall, for offering timely and constructive comment on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I’m also appreciative of the many other faculty at the University of Pittsburgh who over the years have provided encouragement and insight. Maurine Greenwald’s steady hand guided me through several critical stages of both my masters and doctorate program; I’m grateful to her for setting high standards and helping me achieve them. Hugh Kearney was the consummate gentleman and scholar; I feel honored to have been able to study with him during the last part of his long and productive career on this side of the Atlantic. Gene Levy at Carnegie Mellon and Roy Lubove of Pitt’s School of Social Work, now both deceased, deepened my appreciation for Pittsburgh’s past; the study of regional history has been diminished by their absence. It feels strange to refer to Ken Heineman and Bill Warren as my fellow graduate students; both are now tenured professors. They remained true