T h e Leisure Revolution: Recreation in the American City, 1820-1 920

By DALE A. SOMERS

The United States between 1820 and 1920 experienced a leisure revolution. Throughout the colonial period and the early years of the republic, Americans adhered fairly rigidly to the gospel of work, which stressed the value of labor and frowned upon the pursuit of pleasure. Business appeared to be their overriding interest, and the acquisition of money their driving force. Travelers seldom failed t o comment on the Yankees total dedication to labor and his avoidance of pleasure. The hypercritical Englishwoman Frances Trollope, who toured the country in 1832, declared: I never saw a population so totally divested of gayety; there is no trace of this feeling from one end of the Union to the other. Another English traveler, Francis J. Grund, observed: The Americans are not fond of any kind of public amusement; and are best pleased with an abundance of business. Their pleasure consists in being constantly occupied. Sir Charles Lyell, the English geologist who lectured throughout America in the 1840s, said the United States seemed to be a country where all, whether rich or poor, were laboring from morning till night, without ever indulging in a holiday. These

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observers probably exaggerated the sobriety of American life, but pleasure-seeking certainly occupied a low position in the typical Americans scale of values before 1820. Social life retained a casualness and a simplicity reminiscent of an older America.l Enthusiasm for recreation on a great scale developed rapidly as the United States shifted from a rural-agrarian to an urban-industrial society. As thousands of people, both native and foreign born, moved into the countrys burgeoning cities, they experienced pressures and problems unknown in rural areas or in the relatively small cities of the colonial period. The century between 1820 and 1920 was in many ways a period of adjustment, a time in which urban Americans learned to live in large cities and to cope with the intricacies of their cramped environment. They developed better transportation systems t o reduce congestion; they experimented with political reforms to curb the excesses of boodling politicians and rapacious businessmen; and they relieved the monotony and the ugliness of cities by beautifying streets and by planning public squares and parks. This process of adjustment produced equally profound changes in urban recreation. Many features of city life, such as long, highly regimented workweeks, the remoteness of the countryside (particularly before improvements in transportation), and the temporary loss of any sense of community that affected many new arrivals in Americas metropolises, rendered the simpler, unorganized, and often spontaneous diversions of rural America unsatisfactory or inaccessible to many residents of the city. As urban centers grew, it quickly became apparent that old patterns of leisure, like other aspects of the countrys rural background, had to adapt to the new requirements of an urban society. People responded to the need for fresh pastimes in a variety of ways. They joined social clubs in ever increasing numbers; they regularly visited the ballrooms and restaurants that multiplied so rapidly in nineteenth-century cities; they listened t o lectures or visited public libraries, which were almost exclusively urban institutions; and some of them engaged in older pastimes, such as drinking and gambling, with unprecedented eagerness. The people will be amused, said the New Yorker Philip Hone; they must have

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some way of passing their evenings besides poking the fire and playing with the children.2 The major answer t o this search for recreation was the appearance and spectacular growth of commercial amusements and organized pastimes, such as the theater, vaudeville, movies, and sports. Between 1820 and 1920 American cities gave birth t o a vast entertainment industry that offered amusement to all classes of people on a variety of intellectual levels. This industry in turn produced major changes both in attitudes toward the value of leisure and in a number of major social institutions. It is the purpose of this paper to present the general outlines of the growth of commercial and organized amusements and t o suggest some of the effects that this leisure revolution has produced in American society. Numerous factors stimulated the boom in leisure-time activities. A gradual reduction in the workday, a rising standard of living, and the decline of Puritanical notions concerning the value of recreationall aspects of the new urban-industrial society-were essential to the development of new diversions. The patronage of well-todo residents, whose commitment to conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption benefitted activities ranging from archery and ballet t o yachting and grand opera, was of vital importance. Foreign-born city dwellers, who brought their own native amusements and above all a European dedication t o the active pursuit of pleasure, also stimulated urban interest in recreation. And finally, there was the role played by promoters such as P. T. Barnum who realized that people who bought essentials such as food, clothing, and housing rather than producing these things for themselves would also purchase pleasure, particularly if it were attractively packaged and cleverly sold. This is a trading world, Barnum observed in his autobiography, and men, women and children, who cannot live on gravity alone, need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is in a business established by the Author of our nature.3 Barnum and other entrepreneurs of recreation prospered, as this statement suggests, because they sensed and exploited a market for leisure outlets in the restless urban masses that increased so rapidly after 1820. One result of this widespread interest in amusement was the

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emergence of a leisure-oriented society. As millions of urban residents actively pursued pleasure, they began to substitute a leisure ethic for the older work ethic; the gospel of work soon yielded t o the gospel of play. To call this a land of labor is t o impute last centurys epithet to us, the president of Colgate University observed in 1926, for now it is a land of leisure. Work remained important, of course, but people tended increasingly to value it in terms of the free time it provided. What Americans wanted, what the leisure ethic emphasized was an abundant supply of free time, time without cumbersome restrictions or work obligations, during which the individual could freely choose his activities. Today, as the sociologist C. Wright Mills has noted, work itself is judged in terms of leisure values. The sphere of leisure provides the standards by which work is judged; it lends to work such meaning as work has. This transposition of values, which constituted the leisure revolution, was almost entirely a product of the cities, for it was in urban centers that conditions proved most conducive to change. In rural areas a Protestant-based prejudice against the misuse of time lingered on for a great many years. As late as 1892, for example, a Georgia Baptist periodical warned: No Christian can follow Jesus, and then be found in a circus. But in cities, which rural Americans often regarded as centers of vice and wickedness, the gospel of play won nearly universal acceptance by 1920. Josiah Strong, a prominent Protestant minister, rather reluctantly conceded in 1907 that in metropolitan communities debilitated nerves crave excitement; hence that large number of saloons, gambling hells, dance halls, and theaters in the most crowded portions of the city.4 The first leisure-time activity to respond to the needs of the city was the theater. Initially a pastime for Americas aristocracy, the theater after 1820 provided entertainment for the masses.5 Wellto-do people continued to visit theaters, but producers relied increasingly on the support of middle-class and working-class pleasure seekers. Theater owners catered to these citizens by lowering the cost of admission and then by building huge, ornate theaters to accommodate the increased volume of business. Opponents of this policy, such as the producer Noah M. Ludlow, warned that reducing

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the price of admission would attract more visitors, but it would also produce a diminution in intelligence and average respectability of the audiences. Nevertheless, the practice continued. In some cities stage managers also produced plays on Sundays to attract people who could not attend on other days. Some people, particularly religious leaders, denounced this violation of the Sabbath, but the producer Solomon F. Smith defended Sunday theatricals against the objections of a few religionists by trade, and some keepers of beerhouses, coffee-houses, billiard-houses, nine-pin alleys, and other establishments not fit to be mentioned here because the hardy mechanic, with his wife and children, the boatman, the visiting stranger, the apprentice, the clerk-these and others flocked to the theater to enjoy an innocent recreation. 6 The democratization of the theater resulted in some startling changes in the character of the dramatic arts in this country. Crowds, particularly when compared to genteel colonial audiences, were unruly and ill-mannered. Riots occurred frequently, for rowdy fans were quick to express displeasure if they found performances less than satisfactory. Even if playgoers resisted the impulse to attack the actors, their conduct left much t o be desired. People in the pit, which was usually reserved for men, drank freely, chewed tobacco, and ate throughout the performance. Mrs. Trollope recalled that when she attended a theater in Cincinnati to see a performance by Frances and Alexander Drake, the spitting was incessant, and the mixed smell of onions and whiskey was enough to make one feel even the Drakes acting dearly bought by the obligation of enduring its accompaniments. The galleries attracted a motley crowd that included prostitutes who came to solicit customers. Hopkinson, a religious journal published in Providence, noted: It is a fact not to be concealed that the company of lewd women is expected and desired at the Theatre. A place is assigned to them so prominent that everybody can see it. It has been said, and it is undoubtedly a fact, that tickets of admission, free of all expense, are sometimes sent by the managers to these abandoned wretches. The freedom of the Theatre has been conferred upon them in consideration of their important and highly acceptable services! Charles B. Parsons,

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who spent most of his acting career in the South before renouncing the stage for the pulpit, indicated that this practice was not confined to the North. Southern managers also placed a few of the e2ite of the frail sisterhood on the free list in order to encourage the attendance of men.7 The levelling of the audiences also brought changes in the nature of dramatic productions. A perceptive actor wrote in 1867: The rapid increase in population in newly formed cities produces a style of patrons whose habits and associations afford no opportunity for the cultivation of the arts. A New Orleans writer, less charitable in his evaluation, observed simply that the popular taste, in its demand for the ultra-humorous, is not very particular, and swallows all sorts of absurdity with infinite gusto. Experience seemed to confirm both views. Efforts to develop an interest in opera, for example, met resistance in all but a few cities, partly because Americans did not understand the language and partly, according to Philip Hone, because of popular opposition to private boxes which formed a sort of aristocratical distinction. . . . I like this spirit of independence which refuses its countenance t o anything exclusive. Another New Yorker, George Templeton Strong, found that nineteenth-century urbanites were equally uninterested in the symphony, though for somewhat different reasons. After a night at the Academy of Music he wrote: Nine-tenths of this assemblage cared nothing for Beethovens music and chattered and looked about and wished it was over. . . . However, its well to bring masses of people into contact with the realities of music; it helps educate their sense of art, and Heaven knows they need it.8 To satisfy the tastes of urban communities theater owners began to place greater emphasis on entertainment other than the principal plays. In ante-bellum theaters singers, dancers, equestrian acts, jugglers, and acrobats appeared regularly before, after, and between the acts of dramatic performances. When these specialty acts began to overshadow the plays in the 1840s and ~ O Ssome , managers separated the two. The result, after some years of development, was the appearance of new forms of theatrical entertainment, including minstrelsy, light musicals, burlesque, and variety shows. Testimony from a number of

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sources indicated that these innovations easily won popular approval. Minstrels attracted large crowds as eager city dwellers flocked t o see black-faced entertainers and to listen t o music loosely based on plantation songs. A New Yorker who saw a band of Ethiopian Serenaders at Palmos Opera House reported: Negro songs, glees, and other refinements of the same kind, helped along by wornout conundrums, form this refined amusement, which is very popular and fills the theater, in which so lately the scientific strains of Italian music floated over empty benches. Singers of popular tunes, once used merely as side attractions in playhouses, found that the demand for entertainment enabled them t o declare their independence from the legitimate theater. After a performance by Jenny Lind in 1852, a writer for To-Day declared: Our country has been about over-run with musical artists recently. Musical enthusiasm has rather drawn attention away from the drama. Burlesque, too, vied for separate audiences. Initially a type of parody or musical travesty burlesque after the Civil War emphasized mainly the attractions of the female form. Appletons Journal complained in 1869 that this entertainment seeks to unite the coarsest fun with the most intoxicating forms of beauty. As these new pastimes rose in popularity during the late nineteenth century, the democratization of the theater took a new turn. By 1900 the legitimate theater of serious drama and polite comedy had been returned to the care of well-to-do residents, while rank-and-file citizens patronized mainly those theaters that specialized in melodrama or that featured comedians, popular singers, soft-shoe dancers, or briefly clad girls.9 In the 1890s technology also presented the masses a new form of theatrical entertainment-moving pictures. The first movies were short pictures of inferior technical quality which people watched in small, makeshift theaters known as nickelodeons, but as the fad caught on, serious producers, such as D. W. Griffith, gave the public feature-length pictures that utilized sophisticated film-making techniques still employed today.10 Early motion pictures encountered stern opposition, ranging from the strictures of clergymen whose congregations were depleted by Sunday movie-goers t o the shrill cries of moralists who feared

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that all sorts of immorality occurred in darkened theaters. The titles of early films alone were enough to arouse the indignation of Americas moral custodians. Chicago nickelodeons in April of 1907 featured movies bearing such titles as Gaieties of Divorce, The Bigamist, The Unwritten Law, Cupids Barometer, and Beware, My Husband Comes. The Chicago Tribune, always a spokesman for traditional values and forever distrustful of novelties, declared that the nickelodeons possessed no redeeming feature to warrant their existence and asked for a law absolutely forbidding entrance of boy or girl under eighteen.ll Despite such opposition movies quickly became a leading feature of American urban recreation. They were geared to popular taste; theater operators showed films at times that enabled workingmen to attend; and they were priced within the reach of virtually everyone. Movies, even more than the theater in the ante-bellum period, assumed the task of providing entertainment for all elements in American cities. Aside from amusing the populace, motion pictures very early in their history demonstrated their power to shape opinion and to arouse the public. D. W. Griffith in 1915 released his classic film The Birth of a Nation, a saga of the Civil War and Reconstruction based on Thomas Dixons pro-southern novel The Clansman. In many ways this movie remains the most significant ever produced in the United States. It made instant stars of several people in the cast, including Lillian Gish, Donald Crisp, and Henry Walthall; it introduced techniques and methods that have influenced filmmaking down to the present; and it established once and for all that the movies could be a serious art form as well as popular entertainment. Nevertheless, the film-was something less than an unqualified success. A Kentuckian by birth, Griffith fully shared the typical white southerners attitudes towards Negroes. The Birth of a Nation presented black legislators as buffoons, and it sugguested that every black man was a fiend whose highest ambition in life was to defile pure white southern women. When the film was shown in Boston, it aroused a storm of controversy. The recently organized National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a militant group for its day, asked that the movie

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be banned; President Charles W.Eliot of Harvard said the film perverted white ideals; and Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, called it a deliberate attempt to humiliate 10,000,000 American citizens and portray them as nothing but beasts. These attacks did little t o lessen the popularity of the motion picture, but they indicated that for better or worse the movies had come of age as a vehicle of communication and social commentary. 1 2 The American city had in the meantime produced still another type of recreation for urban residents-organized sports. Despite the mass appeal of movies and various types of theatrical diversions, they were not altogether satisfactory substitutes for the outdoor leisure activities associated with rural living. An ante-bellum southern sportsman, dedicated to hunting and fishing, explained that only people who are in the habit of walking alone dusty and crowded streets, gazing upon endless brick rows, listening with forced patience t o the business din and rattling vehicles, of a commercial city, can fully appreciate the pleasure felt, when opportunity enables you to flee these turmoils, for the quietude of a favorite country seat. Not everyone possessed the necessary leisure time or money to embark upon lengthy expeditions into the field, but many sports played in the city permitted restless, work-worn residents to participate in or to observe outdoor activities that captured the essence of rural diversions. The rise of sports also pleased observers who believed that it was unhealthy for people who spent their days cooped up in factories or offices to seek pleasure in crowded, poorly-lit , and ill-ventilated theaters at night. A correspondent for Wilkes Spirit of the Times, a sporting journal, observed in 1869 that the country needed athletic activities, for I believe with due exercise of the body the ills we delight in nursing will fade away, and an energy we so much need take their place. Sports thus made great strides before 1920 by catering to urban desires for pastimes that not only offered pleasant recreation but also provided a means of improving the health and vitality of city dwellers and produced nostalgic recollections of rural outings.13

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The growth of organized sports, once underway, was phenomenal. Sporting clubs and teams, intercity leagues, and professional athletes appeared in rapid profusion in every city of any consequence. The first result of this surge of interest in outdoor activities was the growth of spectator sports. This activity soon became an essential part of the nations entertainment industry as urban residents easily acquired the habit of assembling by the thousands to watch others perform. Horse racing, which began to attract large crowds at tracks from New York to New Orleans in the 1820s and 30s was the first great spectator sport, but it was in time joined by others, including professional baseball, yachting and rowing, prize fighting, and football. Popular interest in these pastimes appeared overpowering almost from their onset. After the first race for the Americas Cup in 1851, one observer decided that the victory by the yacht America was quite creditable t o Yankee shipbuilding certainly, but not worthy the intolerable, vainglorious vaporings that make every newspaper I take up now ridiculous. One would think yachtbuilding were the end of mans existence on earth. This reaction was an accurate portent of things to come. Such was the appeal of athletic pastimes that in 1887 Puck magazine printed a phrenological chart, entitled Sports on the Brain, which divided Uncle Sams cranium among more than twenty sports. The biggest bump went to baseball, which Mark Twain said was the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century. By the fin de siecle interest in sports had clearly reached amazing proportions. It seems t o be the weakness of the American people to take nearly everything in crazes, a writer for the Nation declared in 1893. There was the greenback craze, and the silver craze, and the granger craze, and the cholera craze, and now there is the athletic craze.14 As organized sports rose t o prominence, critics began t o complain that this leisure-time activity, along with other urban pastimes, made spectators of too many people. American Jeremiahs argued that the rural tradition of universal participation

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had been lost in the mad rush toward cities. In its place, they said, had arisen passive observation, which seemed likely to leave the entire nation weak and debilitated. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the first t o voice this concern, wrote in 1858: I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage. Seventy years later the historian John Allen Krout wrote that the rise of athletic pastimes has not made us a nation of participants in sports, but a nation of spectators at sporting events. . . . There may be benefit in all this, but it hardens no muscles and reduces no waist lines. Perhaps it would not be amiss in the coming years if we pondered well the question whether from the plethora of sports our nation has reaped an adequate harvest. More recently, the political scientist James C. Charlesworth has suggested that mass spectation poses a dark threat to American democracy, for, if people are trained to sit and watch professionals in sport and other leisure activities, they will also sit and watch some ambitious busybodies take their government away from them and operate it.l5 These observers, although separated in time by more than a century, all exaggerated the extent, or at least the impact, of mass observation. Concern over the lack of participation perhaps possessed some merit in the early days of organized sport when long hours and short pay inhibited many potential players and encouraged them t o participate vicariously by watching the feats of others. But even before the Civil War the argument that the rise of sports made Americans a nation of onlookers had begun t o lose much of its validity. Sports assumed major importance in American life in the latter half of the nineteenth century not only because they entertained urban crowds with commercial spectacles such as professional baseball, horse racing, and prize fighting, but also because they gave people a chance to play. Billiards, bowling, amateur baseball, rowing, golf, tennis, track and field, and a number of other athletic pastimes encouraged widespread participation between 1820 and 1920. Critics who lamented the growth of mass spectation simply failed to count the number of games

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that took urban residents out of the grandstand and onto the playing field. Near the end of the century a writer for the Review of Reviews stated: There is an open-air movement almost revolutionary in its degree. . . . People are bicycling, yachting, running, jumping, fishing, hunting, playing baseball, tennis, and golf, to an extent which is new in this generation. A commentator for the Saturday Evening Iost concurred: The American love of sports has risen to a pitch never before known. . . . This is the era of sport. Practically every man and boy, every woman and girl, takes part, or wishes to take part, in some branch of it. And it is fortunate that the field is broad enough for all. Sports thus provided entertainment for both participants and spectators; most people played both roles at various times in their leisure hours.16 Although their tastes were varied, Americans seemed to be particularly fond of sports that emphasized speed, strength, and rugged exercise. The almost classless and nearly universal appeal of activities such as bicycling, prize fighting, and football, which epitomized what Theodore Roosevelt called the strenuous life, indicated that people in this country seized upon sport, in the words of the historian John Higham, as one way to break out of the frustrations, the routine, and the sheer dullness of an urbanindustrial culture. Moreover, many observers believed that physically demanding athletic pastimes instilled in American youth the values and the training that enabled people to perform remarkable feats in all areas of life. Football, to cite one example, appeared to cultivate the qualities that would empower a man to survive the ruthlessness of the business world or, as a writer for the Saturday Evening Post declared, that would enable a man to lead a charge up San Juan Hill or guide the Merrimac into Santiago Harbor. When overemphasis on sports inspired college athletes to resort to questionable tactics in order to win, however, some critics expressed doubts about pastimes that encouraged and rewarded unethical standards of behavior. Men trained in such methods through all the years of school and college life may become future leaders, one skeptic wrote, but they will be leaders in the art of evading taxes, manipulating courts, and outwitting

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the law of the land. Needless to say, warnings such as this one generally had little impact, for most people believed that the benefits of sports far surpassed the disadvantages. Interest in sports supposedly had a particularly salubrious effect in the South. A writer for Harpers Weekly declared: The Southerner is prone to drift, and by the pleasantest route. The athletic wave that has swept over the South has put new spirit into the young men, and lessened the receipts of saloons t o an appreciable degree.l7 Whatever the reasons for the appeal of organized sport, there could be no denying its conquest of the country. By 1920 the United States had two major professional baseball leagues as well as a number of minor ones; horse racing annually attracted hundreds of thousands of fans; professional football was in its infancy; and professional prize fights were drawing record crowds. The National Collegiate Athletic Association had been organized in 1906 to rule over a vast empire of collegiate and intercollegiate athletics; and the Amateur Athletic Union, founded in 1888, supervised an equally large network of amateur competition. Americans had developed what Lord James Bryce called a passion for looking on at and reading about athletic sports. . . . It occupies the minds not only of the youth at the universities, but also of their parents and the general public. Baseball matches and football matches excite an interest greater than any other public events except the Presidential election, and that comes only once in four years.l8 Sports clearly had claimed a position of importance alongside other types of popular entertainment. As this survey has suggested, the United States by 1920 was well on its way t o becoming a leisure-oriented country. The tremendous growth of commercial amusements and organized sports between 1820 and 1920, predictably enough, had a profound influence on various aspects of American society. Scholars have yet t o examine fully the impact of these activities on national life, but some results of the leisure revolution are readily discernible. The rise of the entertainment industry gave employment t o tens of thousands of people; it contributed countless words and phrases to the language; and it influenced clothing styles. Newspapers

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added special sections to report leisure activities; and publishers issued a number of sporting, theatrical and general leisure magazines to chronicle the countrys pursuit of pleasure.19 Commercial amusements, particularly organized sports, also provided a social safety valve that allowed great masses of people to blow off steam in a relatively harmless way. The density of urban populations; the insistence that everyone engage in what was constantly described as the ruthless struggle for survival; the disappointment and disillusionment felt by the vast majority of people who could never hope to rise to the top rungs of the economic and social ladders; the necessity for synchronizing and regimenting the movements of thousands of people in densely populated areas; and the friction caused by the presence of thousands upon thousands of people of diverse social, economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds all produced a potentially explosive situation. The explosion failed to occur partly because commercial amusements and organized recreation offered outlets for the tensions generated in urban centers. Residents relieved some of their personal and occupational frustrations by joining amateur theatrical groups, by playing on athletic teams, or simply by watching others perform. Participation in leisure activities, whether actual or vicarious, helped to restore a sense of individualism to people living in a mass society; it offered a degree of excitement and perhaps an element of chance to people whose lives were otherwise very orderly and highly routinized, not to say dull; and it directed competitive impulses into relatively harmless, if not always productive, channels.20 Amusements also contributed to the democratization of society by helping to lower barriers which have traditionally separated the various ethnic and economic groups present in great American cities. At a time when some features of urban life, such as rapid, poorly planned growth, an increase in specialization and the division of labor, and the infusion of heterogeneous elements into the city, tended to isolate people and to destroy all sense of community, commercial amusements acted as a countervailing force. The theater, the movie house, and the athletic arena served as great mixing bowls that brought together people of different classes and ethnic back-

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grounds and gave them similar interests. The entertainment industry, like urban politics and organized crime, also provided a ladder of economic and social mobility for members of disadvantaged groups. Finding other avenues of ascent closed to them, people in societys lower levels could and did move upward by becoming professional actors, singers, comedians, and athletes. Success in the entertainment industry seldom brought immediate membership in Americas social elite, but it certainly provided an egress from proverty and humiliation for thousands of people. The common pursuit of pleasure could not fully bridge economic and ethnic divisions nor fulfill entirely its promises of social and economic mobility, but it nevertheless accelerated the trend toward full democratic participation in all phases of American life. The most conspicuous failure of commercial recreation as a social mixer was in the area of race relations. Today it is a truism to say that Negroes have been able to achieve a degree of mobility in the entertainment business denied to them in other occupations. Only a few years ago a writer for the Saturday Review observed: The world of sport has now become, along with the Supreme Court decisions, the civil rights movement, the exploding postwar economy, and world opinion, an undeniable force in moving the United States toward full integration. Whatever the truth of this remark today-and friction on professional athletic teams and in college athletic programs suggests certain flaws in the argumentthe world of entertainment has not always been such a peacemaker. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several factors brought about a drastic decline in the position of Negroes in American life and in relations between blacks and whites. Indifference on the part of the Federal government; the broad appeal of the philosophy of Social Darwinism, which encouraged a belief in racial superiority; the influence of writers such as Madison Grant, who stressed the necessity of maintaining the purity of the great race of AngloSaxons; and national adventures in imperialism, which brought many non-Anglo-Saxons under American domination, all combined to convince large segments of the white population that they deserved a position of supremacy in America. As a result Negroes found

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themselves in an increasingly hostile society. Black Americans experienced the same restrictions and discriminatory policies in the entertainment industry that they encountered in other areas of national life. Places of amusement throughout the country and particularly in the South regularly segregated customers according to race. Theaters, saloons, grandstands, billiard parlors, tenpin alleys, and a variety of other public facilities required black citizens to occupy special sections or t o frequent establishments built exclusively for them. An anonymous Negro in 1887 complained to George Washington Cable, a white southerner who spent his life battling racial discrimination: A person having a few drops of African blood in his veins no matter how white he may be is considered a Nigger and has to be cooped in the cockloft of a theatre or stay at home. . . . So it is, the moral suffering of a man having a little negro blood in his veins is something terrible-for he is always in hot water-fear of being insulted by being ejected from public places.21 If public entertainment facilities drew a rigid color line for spectators, as this letter indicates, racial barriers were no less formidable for black participants. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth Negro actors (or whites in blackface) appeared in plays and later movies only in demeaning roles. Black athletes found the doors t o professional teams and sports locked against them. Negro baseball players, permitted to play on professional teams for several years after the Civil War, were gradually excluded from the National and American leagues. Negro jockeys, who for years rode thoroughbreds throughout the country without opposition, were gradually driven off tracks until by the 1930s there were only thirteen active black riders out of a total of more than nine hundred. White prize fighters, led by John L. Sullivan, refused to enter the ring with black pugilists. When the Negro fighter George Dixon, champion of the featherweights, beat Jack Skelly, a white fighter, in a title match in New Orleans in 1892, a local paper spoke for much of the nation when it observed: It is a mistake to match a negro and a white man, a mistake to bring the races together on any terms of equality, even in the prize ring.

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Jack Johnson, who became champion in 1908, inspired a nationwide quest for a white hope that ended only when Jess Willard defeated the black heavyweight in 1915. By 1920 it was evident that contact between the races in all phases of the entertainment industry occurred on the same basis as in other fields of endeavor: Whites insisted upon black subordination. For all their alleged equality of opportunity, theaters, movies, and sports merely reflected prevailing views.22 Another area of American life that felt the impact of the leisure revolution was American Protestantism. Throughout the nineteenth century Protestant ministers consistently resisted the trend toward mass recreation. They, even more than business leaders, stressed the true Christians obligation to work hard and to avoid the temptations of pleasure. As late as 1890, for example, a Texas Methodist wrote: Life is short, and no time is to be lost in youths valuable years. . . . Sport, fun, and frolic, have no chapter in youths Book of Life in our day; learning and doing fill up the entire volume. This sentiment, which remained strong in rural areas well into the present century, seemed to many observers to be woefully outdated in the urban-industrial society that had emerged in the nineteenth century. As a result ministers in metropolitan communities began, albeit reluctantly and belatedly, to face the challenges and the realities of the new society.23 When Protestant leaders honestly confronted the problems and questions raised by industrialization and urbanization, they produced a new creed known as Social Christianity or the Social Gospel. Part of this new approach was a candid appraisal of the need for leisure-time activities in urban communities. Leaders of the Social Gospel, such as Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch, conceded, in Strongs words, that Places of amusement and recreation are an important part of environment in the city. Since people were going to seek entertainment, these men reasoned, it was important to offer Christian pastimes that would rescue people from what Strong called coarse threatricals, gambling hells, promiscuous public dances, and drinking saloons. The duty of the Church with respect t o popular amuse-

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ments is not done when it has lifted up its warning against the abuses that grow out of them, and laid down its laws of temperance and moderation in their use, Gladden wrote in his famous treatise Applied Christianity. It has a positive function to fulfill in furnishing diversions that shall be attractive, and, at the same time, pure and wh0lesome.2~ Churches responded t o this call t o duty in a variety of ways. Ministers spoke and wrote in defense of proper amusements. The Young Mens Christian Association and the Young Womens Christian Association played important roles in Christianizing certain urban amusements. The major Protestant solution t o this recreational need was t o equip churches with gymnasiums, libraries, and rooms for games, concerts, and other pastimes. These institutional churches, as they were called, provided the populace with what Strong described as Sanctified Amusements. Rauschenbusch, writing in 1919, predicted that the development of such wholesome social pleasures would ultimately mean that the so-called pleasures of the saloon and sex hell will be relegated t o the place from which they ascended. By 1920 Protestant leaders of nearly all denominations had learned that urban churches could flourish only if they ministered to the temporal as well as the spiritual needs of their parishioners.25 Women, like the churches, benefitted from the leisure revolution and particularly from the rise of organized sports. The American woman, trying to free herself from the confining aspects of Victorian society, saw participation in sports as a convenient method of vivifying her struggle for equality with men. Croquet, tennis, archery, golf, and especially bicycling were activities that permitted women to participate as actively as men. Mrs. Reginald de Koven wrote in Cosmopolitan in 1895: To men, rich and poor, the bicycle is an unmixed blessing; but to women it is deliverance, revolution, salvation. I t is well nigh impossible to overestimate . . . its influence in the matters of dress and social reform. The Boston Rescue League sought t o stem female enthusiasm for sports by pointing out that thirty per cent of the fallen women who came to the league for aid had been

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bicycle riders at one time. And Mr. Dooley, the fictional creation of Finley Peter Dunne, also added a word of warning about athletics for women. In the nex eighty or ninety years if I make up me mind to leave this boistherous life an settle down, the lady that Ill rayquist to double me rent an divide me borrowin capacity will wear no medals f r athletic spoorts. Fr, Himmessey, Im afraid I cud not love a woman I might lose a fight to. Such admonitions, of course, went unheeded. By the early years of the twentieth century the athletic woman had become a symbol of the New Woman, and everything from clothing styles to voting requirements began to change. It was but another indication of the tremendous impact of the leisure revolution that had occurred in American cities between 1820 and 1920.26
NOTES lFrances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London and New York, 1832), 171; Francis J. Grund, The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations (New York and London, 1968; 2 vols. in one; reprint of edition first published in Bostion, 1837), 76-77; Sir Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America (New York and London, 1849), 11, 91. For similar comments, see Trollope, Domestic Manners, 242, 244; James S. Buckingham, America, Historical, Statistic, and Descriptive (New York, 1841), 11,4344, 351-52; and Thomas Low Nichols, Forty Years of American Life (London, 1864), I, 401-402. 2Allen Nevins (ed.), The Diary ofPhilip Hone, 1828-1851 (New York, 1927), 11, 572. 3P.T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years Recollections o f P . T. Barnum (Hartford, 1871), 72. For general accounts dealing with the subject of leisure, see Nels Anderson, Work and Leisure (Glencoe, Ill., 1961); Charles K. Brightbill, The Challenge of Leisure (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1960); Charles K. Brightbill, Educatingfor Leisure-Centered Living (Harrisburg, Pa., 1966); Sebastian de Grazia, O f Time, Work, and Leisure (New York, 1962); Arnold W. Green, Recreation, Leisure, and Politics (New York, San Francisco, Toronto, London, 1964); Max Kaplan, Leisure in America: A Social Inquiry (New York and London, 1960); Eric Larrabee and Rolf a s s Leisure (Glencoe, Ill., 1958);Bernard Rosenberg and Meyersohn (eds.), M Daniel M. White (eds.), Mass Culture (Glencoe, Ill., 1957). An excellent account of the play-element in western civilization is Johann Huizinga, Homo

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Ludens: A Study o f the Play-Element in Culture (Boston, 1955; Beacon Press

edition). The best general history of pleasure seeking in America is Foster Rhea Dulles, A History ofRecreation: America Learns to Play (New York, 1965; second edition). 4George B. Cutten, The Threat o f Leisure (New Haven, 1926), 17; C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York, 1956), 236; Josiah Strong, The Challenge o f the City (New York and Cincinnati, 1907), 115. The Georgia Baptist periodical is quoted in William R. Hogan, Sin and Sports, in Ralph Slovenko and James A. Knight (eds.), Motiwations in Play, Games and Sports (Springfield, Ill., 1967), 123. 5There are a number of good histories of the American theater. Among the most useful are Hugh F. Rankin, The Theater in Colonial America (Chapel Hill, 1965);James H. Dorman, Jr., Theater in the A n t e Bellurn South, 18151861 (Chapel Hill, 1967); Francis Hodge, Yankee Theater: The Image o f America on the Stage, 1825-1850 (Austin, 1964); Bernard Hewitt, Theater U.S. A., 1668-1957(New York, 1959); Howard Taubman, The Making o f the American Theater (New York, 1965); and Arthur Hornblow, A History o f the Theater in Americafrom Its Beginnings to the Present Time (2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1919). 6Noah M. Ludlow, Dramatic Life A s I Found I t (New York, 1966; reprint of edition first published in St. Louis, 1880), 545; Solomon F. Smith, Theatrical Management in the West and South f o r Thirty Years. Interspersed with Anecdotal Sketches (New York, 1868), 232-33. 7Trollope, Domestic Manners, 116;Hopkinson, 111 (February, 1829), 327, quoted in Frank L. Mott, A History o f American Magazines, 1741-1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), 430-31; [Charles B. Parsons], The Pulpit and the Stage; or, The T w o Itinerancies. An Historic, Biographic, Philosophic Miscellany. B y One Who Knows (Nashville, 1860), 65, quoted in Dorman, Theater in the Ante Bellum South, 237. For descriptions of riots, often provoked by British actors who allegedly made disparaging remarks about America, see Nevins (ed.), Diary ofPhilip Hone, I , 49-51,134; 11,866-70; and Allen Nevins and Milton H. Thomas (eds.), The Diary o f George Templeton Strong (New York, 1952), I, 351-53. See also Dorman, Theater in the A n t e Bellurn South, 232-57; Dulles, History o f Recreation, 103-107; and Richard Moody, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington, Ind., 1958). 8William Davidge, Footlight Flushes (New York, 1867), 202, quoted in Dulles, History o f Recreation, 100; New Orleans Bee, January 7 , 1861; Nevins (ed.), Diary o f Philip Hone, I , 183;Nevins and Thomas (eds.), Diary o f George Templeton Strong, 11, 311. 9Nevins (ed.), Diary o f PhiZip Hone, 11, 710; To-Day, I (January 3, 1852), 16, quoted in Frank L. Mott, A History ofAmerican Magazines, 18501865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), 194;AppZetonsJournaZ, I (July 3, 1869),440,

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quoted in Frank L. Mott, A History o f American Magazines, 1865-1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938, 206. See also Dulles, History of Recreation, 114-20, 215-19; Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham, N. C., 1930); Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise o f Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, Okla., 1962); and Gilbert Chase, Americas Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York, Toronto, London, 1955), chapters 13, 14, 16, 21, 22, 23. 1For general accounts of the movies, see Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture (New York, 1964; reprint of edition first published in 1924); Leo Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, The Movie Makers (New York, 1941); Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Cultural History (New York, 1968; second edition); Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer, The Movies: The Sixty-Year Story of the World o f Hollywood and Its Effect on America, f r o m Pre-Nickelodeon Days to the Present (New York, 1957); Lloyd Morris, N o t So Long Ago (New York, 1949), Part One; Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies (New York, 1957); and Dulles, History of Recreation, chapter 17. llThe movie titles and the quote from the Chicago Tribune are from Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 473-74. 12For accounts of the controversy surrounding The Birth of a Nation, see Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 635-44, especially p. 643 for the reactions cited and quoted in this paragraph; and Morris, N o t So Long Ago, 66-74. The film, incidentally, was revived throughout the South in the 1950s t o arouse opposition to school integration and the civil rights movement generally. 13Spirit of the Times (New York), XXI (July 26, 1851), 271; Wilkes Spirit of the Times (New York), X X I (September 11, 1869), 53. 14Nevins and Thomas (eds.), Diary of George Templeton Strong, 11, 6566;Puck, XXI (June 1 , 1887), 236; Samuel L. Clemens, Welcome Home: To a Baseball Team Returning from a World Tour by Way of the Sandwich Islands (1889), in Mark Twains Speeches, Vol. 28 of The Writings o f Mark Twain (New York, 1923), 145; The Athletic Craze, Nation, LVII (December 7, 1893), 423. 1501iver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Atlantic Monthly, I (May, 1858), 881;John Allen Krout, American Themes, edited by Clifford Lord and Henry R. Graff (New York and London, 1963), 125; James C. Charlesworth, A Comprehensive Plan for the Wise Use of Leisure, in James C. Charlesworth (ed.), Leisure in America: Blessing or Curse? (Philadelphia, 1964), 39-40. 16Review of Reviews, XIV (July, 1896), 58, quoted in Frank L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1885-1905 (Cambridge, 1957), 369; Harry T. Paxton (ed.), Sport U. S. A.: The Best f r o m the Saturday Evening Post

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(New York, 1961), 4. 17John Higham, The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s, in John Weiss (ed.), The Origins of Modern Consciousness (Detroit, 1965), 27; Saturday Evening Post, CLXXI (November 19, 1898), 330, quoted in Mott, History o f American Magazines, 1885-1905, 375; Clarence F. Birdseye, Individual Training in Our Colleges (New York, 1907), 162, quoted in Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York, 1962), 382; Casper W. Whitney, Amateur Sport, Harpers Weekly, XXXVII (December 23, 1893), 1239. 18James Bryce, America Revisited: The Changes of a Quarter Century, Outlook, L X X X (March 25, 1905),738-39. l9For an indication of the impact of commercial amusements and sports on American life, see Max Lerner, America A s a Civilization: Life and Thought in the UnitedStates Today (New York, 1957), chapter 11; Frederick W. Cozens and Florence Scovil Stupf, Sports in American Life (Chicago, 1953); Robert H. Boyle, Sport-Mirror of American Life (Boston and Toronto, 1963); John R. Betts, Sporting Journalism in Nineteenth-Century America, American Quarterly, V (Spring, 1953), 39-56; John R. Betts, The Technological Revolution and the Rise of Sport, 1850-1900, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XL (September, 1953), 231-56; Frank L. Mott, A History ofAmerican Journalism (New York, 1958; second edition), 297-98,443, 578-79; Mott, History of American Magazines, 1741-1850, 165-69, 172-73,427-30,435-37, 479-82; Mott, History of American Magazines, 1850-1865, 194-204; Mott, History of American Magazines, 1865-1885, 192-222; Mott, History of American Magazines, 1885-1905, 250-62, 371-82. 20Frederic Logan Paxson, The Rise of Sport, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, IV (September, 1917), 145; Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (11 vols.; London, 1934-1959), IV, 242; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934), 303-307. 21Richard L. Tobin, Sports as an Integrator, Saturday Review, L (January 21, 1967), 32; Justice to George Washington Cable, February.24, 1887, George Washington Cable Papers (Special Collections, Tulane University Library). 22New Orleans Times-Democrat, September 8 , 1892. See also Lindsay Patterson (comp.), Anthology of the American Negro in the Theater (New York, Washington, London, 1968), section one; David Q. Voigt, American Baseball: From Gentlemans Sport to the Commissioner System (Norman, Okla., 1966), 278-79; Charles B. Parmer, For Gold and Glory: The Story of Thoroughbred Racing in America (New York, 1939), 150-51; Alexander Johnston, Ten-And Out!: The Complete Story of the Prize Ring in America (New York, 1947; third edition), 94, 182-202; Finis Farr, Black Champion: f i e Life and Times o f Jack Johnson (New York, 1964).

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23H. A. Graves, Andrew Jackson Potter: The Noted Parson of the Texas Frontier (Nashville, 1890), 448, quoted in Hogan, Sin and Sports, 122. Hogans article is an excellent account of the change in Protestant attitudes toward recreation, especially sports, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 24Strong, Challenge of the City, 115;Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of Social Questions (Boston and New York, 1886), 270. 25Strong, Challenge of the City, 223; Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York, 1919), 440,442. 26Cosmopolitan, XIX (August, 1895), 386, quoted in Mott, History of American Magazines, 1885-1905, 378; Philistine, I (July, 1895), 63, quoted in ibid.; Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley At H i s Best, edited by Elmer Ellis (New York, n.d.), 184. See also Andrew Sinclair, The Emancipation of the American Woman (New York, 1965), 107; and Ernest R. Groves, The American Woman: The Feminine Side of a Masculine Civilization (New York, 1944), 386.

Dale A. Somers is Associate Professor of History, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia.