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Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. Bell & Howell Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Artx)r, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 UMI* PLAY BY THE RULES: THE CREATION OF BASKETBALL AND THE PROGRESSIVE ERA. 1891-1917 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Marc Thomas Horger, M.A. The Ohio State University 2001 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor K. Austin Kerr, Adviser Professor Mel Adelman Adviser Professor Leila Rupp History Graduate Program UMI Number: 9999397 Copyright 2001 by Horger, Marc Thomas All rights reserved. UMI UMI Microform 9999397 Copyright 2001 by Bell & Howell Information and teaming Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Copyright by Marc Thomas Horger 2001 ABSTRACT A new kind of professional social reformer sought to impact American society in a new way in the late 19^' and early 20"^' centuries. Physical education professionals — trained in scientific theory, confident in the wide applicability of their expertise — adopted competitive team games as a means of molding the physical, moral, and social characteristics of young men and women. The invention of the game of basketball in 1891 was one of the first concrete manifestations of their outlook. Educators and reformers used basketball to teach children and young adults particular kinds of values on organized playgrounds, in high schools and colleges, and in institutions like the YMCA and settlement houses. They viewed it as a tool of social cohesion. Yet it often became something different: a highly competitive public spectacle, played in front of paying crowds by professionals and skilled amateurs, and not simply a tool for educators and social reformers. Studying the game’s early history therefore illuminates a wide variety of the issues currently of interest to scholars of the Progressive era: the growth and spread of the ethos of professionalism, the tradeoff between individualism and social cohesion, the 11 relationship of sport to contemporary conceptions of gender, and the relationship of sport and physical education to social reform. The development of basketball as both educational instrument and public spectacle illuminates the ways in which reformers and professionals designed an institution to suit their purposes — and how the targets of reform sometimes turned it to different purposes. in For Julie IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many mentors and colleagues have helped shape this dissertation. I would especially like to thank K. Austin Kerr and Mel Adelman for their contribution to my intellectual development, their patience with this project, and their friendship. I would also like to thank the following mentors, scholars, and friends: Leila Rupp, William Childs, Brad Austin, Pippa Holloway, Amy Greenberg, Alexis McCrossen, Pam Pennock, Christienne Hinz, Leigh Ann Craig, Anna Travis, Mark Spicka, and Greg Wilson. VITA December 23, 1971 ......................................... Bom — Toledo, Ohio 199 4 A.B. History, Harvard University 199 5.................................................................... M.A. History, The Ohio State University 1995-2000..........................................................Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University 2000-present Visiting Instructor in History, Kenyon College PUBLICATIONS I. Marc Horger, “Basketball and Athletic Control at Oberlin College, 1896-1915,’ Journal o f Sport History 23(FalI 1996), pp. 256-283. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field; History VI TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ..........................................................................................................................................ü Dedication.................................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................... v Vita................................................................................................................................................vi Introduction....................................................................................................................................l Chapters: 1. Social Control From Scratch: Rethinking the Birth of Basketball........................... 13 2. Play Yourself Progressive; Basketball as Instrumental Sport.................................. 55 3. Angry Mammals Chasing a Ball Around a Small Cage; The Rise and Fall of the East Liverpool Five, 1898-1909................................................................................. 98 4. Major College, Minor Sport: Men’s Varsity Basketball at Four Big-Time Universities................................................................................................................... 136 5. Minor College, Major Sport: Basketball at Oberlin College....................................210 6. “Each One Was a Regular Lioness Inside”: The Opportunity and Danger of Basketball for Women, 1892-1917 .......................................................................... 249 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................298 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 303 vu INTRODUCTION There is an interesting paradox at the core of the history of American sport, and indeed of American culture as a whole, that runs something like this: how is it that in the United States, allegedly the most “individualistic” of the modem industrial nations, the landscape of sport is dominated by team games such as football, baseball, and basketball, while more clearly individualistic sports like tennis or track and field fail to draw a comparable following? Why did something like baseball become the “American Game,” to be challenged over time by similarly team-oriented pursuits like football and basketball? The answer lies, I believe, in the fact that America’s dominant sporting ideology developed in what historians continue to call the Progressive Era, an era in which the contest between self-interested individualism and the necessity of social cohesion through shared values played out directly, contentiously, and self-consciously. The ideology of American team sport was and is very much concerned with questions that troubled a broad range of reformers, social thinkers, and public figures in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. What should be the proper relationship 1 between the individual and the social? How can individual initiative and invidious competition be reconciled with the common good? How can a nation have both social pluralism and social cohesion? How can social cohesion, if attainable, be encouraged and maintained by stable cultural institutions? How can aggressive conceptions of middle-class manhood be promoted in an increasingly “over-civilized” urban society? The late 19'*' and early 20'*' centuries therefore produced Yale football guru Walter Camp’s ideology of the football team as a corporate entity in which the individual submerges himself for the sake o f team success; they produced the ethos of “scientific play” that dominated the aesthetic of baseball at the turn of the century, valuing the manufactured run over individual slugging prowess; they produced Theodore Roosevelt’s notion of football as a passable substitute for the regenerative qualities of war. This ideology of sport demanded individual achievement and valued winning above all else, but insisted that winning be achieved through team cohesion and sacrifice of individual success to corporate goals.* The early history of the game of basketball offers a unique means of looking at how Americans dealt with some of these questions. Although basketball was not the most ‘ See in particular Michael Oriard. Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill: University'