During the colonial period recreation took many forms, but exercise as an end in itself was not for most people a priority. Society was overwhelmingly rural. Clearing land, plowing--indeed, all agricultural activity--supplied enough exercise for nearly everyone. Another restraining factor in some areas was the injunction against "profaning" the Sabbath, the only time working people had to relax.
Hunting had its recreational aspect, but for most people its primary purpose was utilitarian. As one historian put it, "The master hunted for the fun of it, the servant for the meat of it." Getting from place to place on horseback was good exercise and could be pleasurable, but it too was mostly of this character. In seventeenth-century Virginia a judge declared that it was "contrary to law for a labourer to make a race" because horse racing was "a sport only for gentlemen."
Children, of course, engaged in all sorts of games and physical activities. "I spent my time," John Adams recalled in his Autobiography, "driving hoops, playing marbles, playing Quoits, Wrestling, Swimming, Skaiting and above all in shooting." Square dancing was popular in some regions and foot racing, bowling, and wrestling were other ways adults employed whatever energy they could muster when the day's work was done.
By the eighteenth century communal projects like barn raisings and clearing land had become occasions for dancing and for racing and other informal athletic contests. In winter skating and sledding were common in northern climes. Crude copies of English-style fox hunts occupied southern planters and some upper-class northern groups.
City people are likely to feel they need more exercise, and this may explain why sports became more popular as cities multiplied and expanded in the nineteenth century. The Reverend Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, wrote and lectured widely on the benefits of diet, fresh air, and exercise in the 1830s. German immigrants introduced gymnastics to America in the decades before the Civil War, among them Francis Lieber, later a professor of history and political science, who ran a gymnastics and swimming school in Boston in the 1820s.
How effective hortatory works like Graham's were in changing people's habits is not clear. A writer in Harper's Monthly described Americans as "a pale pasty-faced, narrow chested spindle-shanked dwarfed race." But scattered evidence suggests that many people became more conscious of the value of physical activity. Crowds of fifty thousand ice skaters jammed the lakes of Central Park in New York while it was still under construction. "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes, could regularly be seen rowing on the Charles River.
Organized sport competitions were rare until midcentury. Young Abraham Lincoln's famous pinning of Jack Armstrong made him the wrestling champion of New Salem, Illinois, but did not lead to a statewide contest. By midcentury, however, team sports were beginning to appear. Except for basketball and lacrosse (the latter first played by American Indians), all the team sports were of European origin. Colleges organized rowing crews, and a rudimentary form of baseball evolved. Competition between teams followed, in rural areas at fairs and revival meetings, in cities on a regular basis. The games attracted crowds, which exposed more people to the fun and excitement of participation, tempted players and entrepreneurs to charge admission fees, and in turn led to professionalism.
The Civil War contributed greatly to the interest in sports. When not engaged in battles or maneuvers, soldiers spent long boring periods in camp with little to do. A lot of their energy went into horseplay and rough-and-tumble, but they also organized foot races, wrestling contests, and team sports, especially baseball.
After the war individual athletic activity and spectator sports advanced in concert. Tennis was imported from England in 1875, golf in the 1880s. For many years both were upper-class activities; people gathered to watch the better athletes, but the crowds were small, the players amateurs, the locations private. Yet these sports (and most others) became organized, nearly all in the 1880s, a time when most of the professions and scholarly disciplines were going through a similar process. A Canoe Association was formed in 1880 as was a group of bicyclists, the League of American Wheelmen. The next year a National Lawn Tennis Association sponsored a "championship" tournament at the posh Casino in Newport, Rhode Island. Norwegian-Americans in Red Wing, Minnesota, created a ski association in 1883. Hockey, a Canadian invention organized there in 1883, was introduced in America a decade later. Professionalization came to these sports only to the degree that some athletes became teachers, instruction being much in demand as the popularity of the sports increased.
Around the turn of the century the tennis and golf associations ran local, regional, and national tournaments. Being easy to play but difficult to master, golf produced large numbers of professional teachers as golf clubs expanded in number and size. The first national open championship, in which amateurs and professionals competed, was held in 1894. But like tennis, golf remained primarily a sport of the elite well into the twentieth century. Most players of ordinary means who learned the game did so by serving as caddies. The first golf "national hero," Francis Ouimet, winner of the 1913 open, got his start in this way. Ouimet remained an amateur, as did the most remarkable of all golfers, Robert "Bobby" Jones, whose grand slam sweep of the American and British open and amateur championships in 1930 has never been equaled. But most outstanding golfers have been professionals. Tennis, however, remained steadfastly amateur for decades, although even before World War II some of the best players turned professional while still in their prime and made large sums playing exhibitions. The upper-class character of tennis and golf eroded during the 1920s and 1930s as public facilities for these sports multiplied, and large crowds attended their national championships.
In the 1960s and after, several trends combined to increase popular participation in sports. People had more leisure time and in a service economy were more in need of exercise. Awareness of the health benefits of athletics produced millions of new bicyclists, joggers, and power walkers, all activities that could be performed at any time and required little special equipment. Even that ultimate test of fitness, the marathon, attracted runners by the thousands--the annual New York race regularly drew twenty thousand or more. The number of women participants in sports of all kinds also increased greatly, partly because of the concern for physical fitness, partly because of feminists' insistence on equal opportunity in all fields.
Finally there was the pervasive impact of television. Spectator sports, of course, were revolutionized by the medium. But it is important to remember that most spectator sports also involved mass participation. Golf and tennis were played by more people than any other game, but millions participated avidly in all the major spectator sports except boxing. If so many people had not, they would not have troubled to watch these sports so often, in stadiums or on television.
Bibliography:
John R. Betts, America's Sporting Heritage, 1850-1950 (1974).
Author:
John A. Garraty
See also Spectator Sports.
