The Sporting Life

ED: For the rest of the hour today on Backstory, we’re going to be marking the upcoming Winter Olympics with a look back on the history of Americans competing on the world stage. And what those competitions have meant to the people back home.

BRIAN: We’ve got stories about the first American woman to throw the shotput on foreign shores. About the famous black power salute on the Olympic victory stand in 1968, and about the tectonic geopolitical shift that was triggered by a game of– yeah– ping-pong.

But first, we’re going to dial the clock back to the years before the American Revolution. As you can imagine, this was a time before American athletes competed as Americans. But sports were already an important feature of social life and the category of sports encompassed a surprisingly wide range of activity.

KENNETH COHEN: All sorts of competitions– in the colonial period, there’s a reference to sport being a question of whether a man can smoke 100 pipes in the course of a day. Which a man does in a Philadelphia tavern and then promptly dies before he can walk out.

ED: This is Kenneth Cohen, a historian of sports at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Ken told me that when it came to the things that we would more easily recognize as sports today, like horse racing or cockfighting, there were representative competitions going back as early as the 1720s when counties would go up against counties, or one colony would challenge the other.

And so I asked him if the revolution ushered in a new period when Americans competed in sports as Americans.

KENNETH COHEN: Well I don’t know that the revolution actually sparked national or international competition in some way, that’s still a long way off. But the revolution does impinge on sport. Because the Continental Congress and a number of state legislatures ban a wide range of the best known and most organized sporting activities in the period, claiming that these are a waste of resources, a waste of time, that they are an immoral distraction from the pure cause of liberty.

ED: So after the revolution, it kind of goes through the crucible of saying, hey, not now, we’re fighting a war, we’re creating a nation. But then the sports reassert themselves. What does that look like, Ken?

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, and so that is actually in many ways more discursive, or in the language than it is in the actual act of participating in sports. So even through the Revolutionary Period, you find newspaper articles that sort of reference British imperial politics as a horse race in which the factions that support America are presented as horses named Liberty or names that Americans would identify with.

And then there are the factions that oppose Americans which are presented with horses with horrible names like Changeling, you don’t know what they’re going to become and what they’re going to do to you. And the Americans really do use sport as a metaphor even though the actual activities are banned and, to some extent, become less frequent during the Revolutionary Period.

And this then carries through to the post-war period and really begins to flourish when America fights Britain again in the War of 1812. The best example of this is a great political cartoon that shows James Madison boxing George the Fourth. And George the Fourth is punched in the nose and he’s actually streaming blood out of his nose in the cartoon. And Madison is sort of saying “ha ha,” you’re overweight and out of shape and can’t handle this fight.

ED: I’m sure it doesn’t say, and I’m five foot three and weigh 105 pounds, right?

KENNETH COHEN: Right, and you’re in an entirely different weight class, so, it’s in all sorts of ways.

ED: Exactly, he was not the most pugilistic of our presidents I wouldn’t think. So you have all this kind of metaphorical use of sport. Does the reality of sport begin to catch up with us as the country regains its balance after the War of 1812?

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, so it takes a while. These bans get lifted as America is reaching or enjoying an economic boom that does allow wealthier Americans to begin to fund, and finance, and organize larger scale sporting events. And it’s– the moral critique against these activities certainly continues, but it gets less traction. People look around and say, well, we’re doing fine, we can afford to do these kinds of things now.

And so you really see a take off in these regional representative events, in terms of a series of North and South horse races starting in the 1820s, which get the most press and attract probably the largest crowds of any sporting events before the Civil War. These are presented as section and regional events.

ED: It seems like a kind of a dangerous way to array competition at a time when the real competition between slavery and free labor and the Republicans the Democrats, whatever, is brewing.

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, I think it could have been. But the way that sport is constructed by the folks who are funding these events really sort of bridges that gap and sport becomes a place where Americans can play out these tensions in a somewhat safer space, a safer way.

And so the northern elite and the southern elite are both using these events to sort of rally support behind them within their regions in a very subtle, very political way. Yet, it’s important to recognize– having said that there’s not a whole lot of differences between the way the Northerners and Southerners approach these kinds of sporting events and the way they organize them– there is a difference in the way they execute them. And so the races in particular reflect one of those primary differences, right which is the labor system.

Where Southerners primarily employ African-American slaves to ride their horses, and Northerners primarily, but not exclusively, employ, generally, Irishmen to ride their horses. Which, of course, really reflects that labor divide but does so in a way, again, that’s trying to rally the general population behind their leaders and representatives from their region.

ED: So, by the 1830s, ’40s, the United States has recovered its sporting mojo and sports are– especially horse racing– seem to be quite common. In other venues, the United States is eager to project itself onto the world stage. Does the same thing happen in sport?

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, I think all of this overall economic growth that we talked about in the first half of the 19th century has America feeling its oats, right. Whether you’re talking about theater and the search for a great American drama, or whether you’re talking about sporting events and trying to prove to the world that America is a mature and competitive country on the global scene, you do find a nationalism sort of sparking a greater conversation.

And so, by the time you get to the 1840s and 1850s, Americans are trying to stage and challenge, largely England, to a range of sporting competitions. The first notable one of these is the America’s Cup, the sailing competition that still exists today.

But shortly on the heels of that, you have a chess prodigy, Paul Morphy from New Orleans who goes over to England and basically beats all the individual national champions around Europe who are willing to face him. And so he comes back hailed as a world champion who’s placed America on the global sporting stage.

ED: Now I can’t help but notice as a historian of the Civil War that a lot of this really seems to be picking up in the 1850s. Is there anything to be made of the fact that United States is projecting itself as a unified nation abroad at the same time it’s kind of coming apart at the seams at home?

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, I mean for the same reason that we talk about so many of the regional and local events being staged in a way that tries to tie local populations to local leaders or regional populations to regional leaders, these representational sporting events– there’s always a certain element of promoting domestic unity in one’s own backyard as much as there is projecting some sort of identity or superiority against your opponent.

And so that’s certainly true in the 1850s and 1860s. There’s a great quote from a newspaper covering Paul Morphy’s chess tour. And when he comes back home, there’s this great celebration. The newspaper says– I’m gonna quote here– “they have come with fraternal impulses from the hills of New England, the rich regions of the middle states, the flowery prairies of the illimitable west. And from my own golden and sunny section where the blue waves of the Gulf of Mexico swell up a constant choral symphony with the music of our national union. They come together as strangers, but they have met as brothers and friends.”

And so all of these supporters of chess from all corners of the country come together to support Paul Morphy, our national champion, which sort of speaks to our roots as a unified country.

ED: That’s a great quote.

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, and so you can really see this being spun in a way to try to represent the fact that sporting culture does bridge these sectional divides and it’s a way in which leaders in both regions try to hold the pieces together over the course of the long, sectional fission that ultimately results in the Civil War.

ED: Ken, thanks so much for explaining this complicated story to us.

KENNETH COHEN: Thanks for having me.

ED: Kenneth Cohen is a history professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He’s the author of They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic.