Popular Culture in the 20th Century: Alternatives to Conventional Sports

4 Alternatives to Conventional Sports

While the west was going through its gorgeous epoch of gambling, drinking, and gun-play, a series of athletic crazes were sweeping through the states of the East. Baseball developed from its humble beginnings in the days before the Civil War to its recognized status as America's national game. The rapid spread of croquet caused the startled editors of The Nation to describe it as the swiftest and most infectious epidemic the country had ever experienced. Lawn tennis was introduced to polite society by enthusiasts who had seen it played in England, and the old sport of archery was revived as still another fashionable lawn game. Roller-skating attained a popularity which extended to all parts of the country. What the sewingmachine is to our industrial wants and the telegraph to our commercial pursuits, one devotee wrote rapturously, this new system of exercise had become to society's physical and social wants.

Track and field events were also promoted with the widespread organization of amateur athletic clubs; gymnastic games were sponsored both by the German Turnverein and the Y.M.C.A.; and in the colleges a spectacular sports phenomenon loomed over the horizon with the development of intercollegiate football. Society welcomed polo as an importation from abroad, took up the English sport of coaching. And finally a craze for bicycling arose to supersede all other outdoor activities as city streets and country roads became crowded with nattily dressed cyclists out on their club runs.

Going further west, skating was even more popular. The Olympian Club Roller Skating Rink in San Francisco advertised five thousand pairs of skates and 69,000 square feet of hardmaple floor. It was holding races, roller-skating polo, and "tall hat and high collar" parties.

Young and old skated -- men, women, and children. For a time no other sport seemed able to match its popularity. A writer in Harper's Weekly cited a gravestone inscription:

Our Jane has climbed the golden stair And passed the jasper gates; Henceforth she will have wings to wear, Instead of roller skates.

But it remained for bicycling to become the most spectacular craze of all. While it had had a brief vogue in the 1860's (the first velocipedes -- the French "dandy horses" -- were known as early as the opening of the century), it was the introduction about 1876 of the high-wheeled bicycles, supplanting the old wooden boneshakers, that first made it a popular sport. Within half a dozen years of the first manufacture of the new wheels, there were some twenty thousand confirmed cyclists in the country; in 1886 the total had swelled to some fifty thousand, and a year later it was over a hundred thousand. Clubs were organized in almost every town and city throughout the land, and to bring together organizations of like interest and promote cycling as a sport, they banded together, in 1881, to form the League of American Wheelmen.

There was still opposition, on both moral and biological grounds, to women competing in vigorous sports. Sports heroines such as the Americans Mildred "Babe" Diedrikson and "the world's fastest woman", Helen Stevens, who disavowed conventional images of femininity, were exploited and ridiculed by the press, who treated them as freaks.

Female athletes began to match the attainments of their male counterparts, yet sought to preserve the feminine qualities of their style. There was however, no stigma attached to women's participation in the Workers' Sports Association, which maintained a philosophy of democracy and openly encouraged female athletes.

By 1930 Workers' Sports Associations were flourishing in most parts of Europe and many areas of North and South America and Asia, with a total membership of over four million. Opposed to both national and sexual chauvinism and to elitism in sport, the Workers' Sports Movement was a massive internationalist working-class organization.

In 1932 it organized the second Workers' Olympics, which took place in Vienna with over 100,000 competitors from 26 countries. The third Workers' Olympics was scheduled to take place in Barcelona in 1936, in opposition to the Nazi Olympics in Berlin, but the Spanish Civil War began on the morning of the opening ceremony. When they returned home, however, many worker athletes were banned from their national associations, whereas those who took part in the Nazi Olympics were hailed as national heroes.

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