2.1 - markovits, andrei s. - the other 'american exceptionalism' - why is there no soccer in the...

7/30/2019 2.1 - Markovits, Andrei S. - The Other 'American Exceptionalism' - Why Is There No Soccer in the United States (E

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The Other "American Exceptionalism" - Why Is There No Soccer in theUnited States?

The Other "American Exceptionalism" - Why Is There No Soccer in the UnitedStates?

by Andrei S. Markovits

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 2 / 1988, pages: 125-150, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=0a3d3f96-8ad3-4089-b110-89e4753b2d5chttp://www.ceeol.com/


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,Andrei S. Markovits

,

Once again, the world's most important media event which undoubtedly capturedthe uninterrupted attention of most of the world's male population for the entiremonth of June 1986, barely left the realm of esoterica in the United States.!Although the quadrennial World Cup was hosted by America's southern neighbor,Mexico, this event failed to capture the imagination of the American public. Interestin the United States was strikingly minute in comparison to that exhibited in virtuallyevery country in the world, including those politically and economically most similarto the United States, i.e. the liberal capitalist democracies of Western Europe,as well as those quite different, i.e. members of the Communist bloc or that looseconglomerate known as the "Third World".2 Even though American televisioncoverage ofWorld Cup'86 was more extensive than ever before, this major globalevent remained outside of the mainstream ofAmerican sports life, let alone publiclife in general. 3 Why does the United States continue to be so aloof with regardto the world's most popular sport? Why has soccer played such a marginal rolein the public consciousness of this sports-crazed society? What are the origins andongoing manifestations of this other "American Exceptionalism"? This paperpurports to shed some light on these questions.Briefly put, the argument focuses on the "crowding out" of soccer in America's,'sports space" as a consequence of the development of indigenous American sportswhich had already become entrenched in American culture by the time Britain'sgame of soccer reached the rest of the world. America's sport "exceptionalism",I submit, derives in good part from the same structural and historical constellations which have come to be known under the term "American exceptionalism".It is particularly America's bourgeois hegemony and legacy of the "first newnation" which contributed substantially to the continued absence of the world'smost popular team sport as a major presence in American popular culture. Aftera brief discussion of the larger historical and theoretical issues, the paper highlightsthe development of soccer in Britain, followed by a discussion of soccer's crowdingout "from above" in America by football and its displacement "from below"by baseball. Some final thoughts offered in a concluding section complete the article.Sombart Revisited and America's Soccer "Exceptionalism":Some comparative clarificationsWerner Sombart, like virtually all European observers of the ' ,NewWorld" beforeand after him, was both fascinated by and ambivalent towards this country. The

Praxis International 8:2 July 1988 02060-8448 $2.00


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126 Praxis Internationalambivalence reflected the invariable combination of both negative and positivegeneralizations based on the "uniqueness" of the United States as a Europeanextension with certain puzzling peculiarities. To Sombart, the most puzzling ofthese "Americanisms" was the absence of a large, well-organized, mass-basedworking class movement headed by a political party. Among the realistic aimsof this party would be the improvement of conditions for its members and voters,who hailed from the working class and thus represented the majority of the population in all industrial societies, including the United States. To achieve its aim,the party would first attain and then exercise state power through the channelsof parliamentary democracy. Given Sombart's concern, his question "Why is thereno socialism in the United States?" is rather misleading. Socialism did not existin the Europe of his time either, thus making the United States quite unexceptionalto any country in the old world. 4 A far more appropriate - though definitely lesselegant - title for Sombart's book would have been "why is there no large,organized, working class movement led by a social democratic party in the UnitedStates?". One could think of few more corroborating compliments to the validityand originality of the study's central observation though, than its continued relevanceas one of the most intellectually exciting bodies of literature in American historyand social science.5The parallels to soccer are striking. Just as Sombart noted the absence of whathe called "socialism", we too can observe a basic absence of soccer, as the dominantparticipant and spectator team sport, in the United States throughout the twentiethcentury. This is not to say that soccer - like Sombart's "socialism" - has beencompletely absent from the American experience. Both appeared on these shoresvirtually concomitantly with their respective "inventions" in Europe and bothcontinue to flourish in various guises. Socialist parties and movements have alwaysexisted in twentieth century America, just like the game of soccer has been playedvirtually without any interruption in this vast country since its introduction in thenineteenth century.6 "Socialism's" fortunes have ebbed and flowed in the largercontext of American politics and intellectual life without ever coming close toattaining a dominant, let alone hegemonic, position like in Europe. Comparativelysoccer has never posed any serious challenge to America's own "big three"featuring baseball, football and the somewhat distant third of basketball. One cansafely predict that neither of these two "un-American" phenomena will disappearin the future, thus lending further testimony to America's pluralism in intellectualthought, politics and sports. It is equally safe to predict however, that neither willassume a place of national prominence in the United States either. Their alreadytraditional role in America ofbeing tolerated, perhaps even appreciated, eccentricities will thus continue. 7 I am not arguing that there exists a a direct relationshipbetween the absence of soccer and "socialism" in the United States when comparedto other industrial democracies. Rather, I will try to show that some of the sameAmerican peculiarities which led to an American "exceptionalism" regarding"socialism" also account for the subordinate place of soccer among Americansports.That soccer is relatively insignificant to Americans is apparent in that what therest of the world, with virtually no exceptions, calls "football", Americans knowonly as "soccer". The preeminence of the term "football" is evidenced by the

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Praxis International 127fact that in most non-English speaking countries where the sport has pride of place,either the term "football" itself is used, modified to conform to the spelling,orthography and pronunciation of the local language, or a literal translation thereof,such as the German "Fussball" or the Hungarian "labdarugas". It is only in countries such as the United States, where the term "football" describes another sportor where Association Football is of secondary importance, that the term' 'soccer"is used. Among these countries have been America's cousins, most notably Australiaand Canada, but also New Zealand and the complicated case of South Africa, all- like the United States - English speaking, former British colonies dominatedby White immigrants. Does this refute the case for "American exceptionalism"with regard to soccer, thus confIning the validity of the concept only to "socialism"?I think not for the following two reasons. First, soccer's subordinate position inthe sports topography of the United States, as well as of these other English-speakingcountries, should not detract from the uniqueness of the American situation, inwhich soccer's potential for eminence as a mass sport was preempted by the creationof three indigenous team sports. Baseball, football and basketball have continuedto enjoy unrivaled popularity among the American public since their respectiveintroductions as mass sports. 8 Ice hockey developed as Canada's national sport.Having successfully exported it south of the border, Canada provided the UnitedStates with yet another, though regionally confined, popular team sport and gavemany countries of the globe's northern hemisphere one of their favorite winteractivities. The rest of Canada's popular sport "space" is dominated by America's"big three" though, with baseball and basketball exact replicas of the Americangames, and Canadian football showing only very minor modifications from itsAmerican cousin. Interestingly, Canada is among the handful of countries wherethe two most parochial and idiosyncratic factors responsible for America's "soccerexceptionalism" - football and baseball - have attained a respectable presenceoutside of the United States. Cricket occupies a major portion ofNew Zealand's,Australia's and South Africa's "sport space' ,, as it does in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistanand the Caribbean islands, i.e. the West Indies. The remainder of the "sport space"in these countries is filled by field hockey (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), rugby(New Zealand and South Africa) and Australian Rules football (Australia). Commonto all of these countries then is the presence of cricket as the national sport, themarginal existence of soccer, and the existence of a second, rather obscure andsomewhat modified British team sport. In contrast to the United States, none ofthese countries developed three virtually new team sports which consumed almostall the existing "sport space" of their society, as the "big three" have in the UnitedStates. Curiously, these "big three" - with the notable exception of basketbal19- have remained almost completely confined to the borders of their creator despitethe latter's preeminent position as the uncontested global leader in the politics,economic affairs and popular culture of the twentieth century.This brings me to the second reason why America's soccer "exceptionalism"differs from the ones briefly mentioned in the preceding lines. By virtue of theUnited States' military, political, economic and cultural hegemony throughout muchof the twentieth century - often referred to with somejustification as "the Americancentury" - almost all of America's actions (or inactions) attain meaning beyondtheir actual reality. The concept of ' ,Americanism" has few, if any, parallels in the


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128 Praxis Internationaltwentieth century, thus denoting the uniquely nodal position of the United Statesin the modern world. This country's hegemony extends beyond the immediate orbitof the liberal democracies of industrial capitalism and is equally significant to thecountries of the Second and Third Worlds. Crudely put, the United States mattersmore in the world's affairs than do Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Importantissues within these countries remain unnoticed by the rest of the world or at bestbecome esoteric items gaining the attention of a few specialists. Newsworthy issuesin the United States though are of national, as well as international, importance.Thus, the editors and sport writers of Sovietski Sport have probably never wonderedwhy New Zealanders or South Africans seem unmoved by soccer. Along withthe rest of the world's soccer fans however, they have most certainly askedthemselves why soccer plays such a marginal role in the United States}OAmerican soccer "exceptionalism" like the absence of "socialism" in the UnitedStates has received so much attention in good part because ofAmerica's predominantglobal position. Whereas the "socialism" debate has generated much impressivescholarship though, the question of soccer' 'exceptionaiisin" has remained confmedto the oral tradition of stadium debates and barroom chatter all over the world.Clearly the two "exceptionalisms" and their consequences for the quality of humanexistence in the United States can not be construed as equally significant. Soccer,while like all major sports a multi-billion dollar business, still remains a game,whereas "socialism" would, at a very minimum, most certainly diminish, if notalleviate, the misery of the American poor by its creation and maintenance of awell-functioning welfare state. Thus, Sombartian "exceptionalism" has renderedthe United States, far and away the richest country in the world, to be the onlymajor industrial democracy without, among other things, a compulsory, stateinvolved, comprehensive national health insurance for its sick. Nothing of comparable importance accompanies American soccer "exceptionalism". This second"exceptionalism" isolates the United States from a leisure activity and collectiveinvolvement though, which has captured the rest of the world's undivided attention since the beginning of this century. It is to the common origins of both"exceptionalisms" that I now turn.America - The First New NationThe most important common denominator for both "exceptionalisms" and thesingle most pervasive underlying variable for an understanding ofAmerican politics

and society is the quintessentially bourgeois nature of this country's objectivedevelopment and subjective self-legitimation from its very inception to the present.This "natural", hence all the more comprehensive, bourgeoisification of Americanpolitics and society created certain structures and an accompanying atmospherewhich definitely distinguished this country from all others in the "old world" andfrom the latter's mere colonial extensions overseas (as opposed to "new world"which, as a concept, remained tellingly reserved almost exclusively for the UnitedStates).ll Central to this burgeoning "Americanism" was the free individual whowas to attain his fulfillment by being an independent, rational actor in a free marketunfettered by any oppressive collectivities, be they the state or social classes,organized religion or the army. In short, bourgeois America created a new identity


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Praxis International 129which prided itself on being explicitly different from that found anywhere inaristocratic Europe. Only by separating church from state could this new societydevelop a politically unchallenged secularism which in turn could be viewed asbeing among the most religious in the advanced industrial world. 12 Moreover,only by establishing an unprofessional military under strict civilian control - inaddition to the continued presence of the' 'frontier" , yet another major ingredientof "American exceptionalism" - could the United States develop into one of themost heavily armed societies among advanced industrial countries. 13 Byestablishing a broad concept of equality which, however, was to remain in a permanently subservient position to the individual's freedom by merely providing himwith equal access to an abundance of opportunities, this new country created aningenious system of popular participation which was at once mediated yet alsocomprehensive. Above all, it created a framework for the development of powerfulmyths of unbound freedom and limitless opportunities, which became one of themost attractive ideologies of the modern world. Indeed, as Leon Samson haspersuasively argued, Americanism carried a veneer laden with terms rather similarto those used by socialism and other movements of the left, due to the abovementioned myths. Thus socialism was "crowded out" from the consciousness andpraxis of this bourgeois America (Americanism = Socialism so to speak.)14 Theprimacy of a bourgeois order is further substantiated by other well-known components of "American exceptionalism": the existence of the franchise for white males;the persistence of two "non-ideological", "pragmatic" and self-defined middleclass parties who, aided by a highly centrist electoral system, have successfully"crowded out" any newcomers; and the crucial role of an integrating nationalismexemplified by the "melting pot". America's soccer "exceptionalism" is alsorooted in this bourgeois order.Modern sports are inextricably tied to the development of mass democracies.Sport in its organized form of regulated leisure and, subsequently, of commodifiedculture, goes hand in hand with such major components of "modernization" asurbanization, industrialization, education and the constantly expanding participationof a steadily growing number of citizens in the public life of politics, productionand consumption. The creation and - perhaps more importantly - dissemminationofmodern sports are thus part and parcel of a bourgeois mode of life. While mostmodem sports were actually' 'invented" by members of society's' 'higher stations"either of aristocratic or, more often, quasi-aristocratic bent, they soon became thepurview of the bourgeoisie and the "masses" , if they were to gain any significancebeyond that enjoyed by polo or croquet, for instance. Thus, it was the two mostbourgeois societies of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Great Britain andthe United States, which founded organized, professional, team sports played andenjoyed by the masses in their own countries, and - in the case of Britain's"inventions", especially soccer - everywhere in the world. IS The disseminationof the respective national sports correlated positively with the two countries' globalposition. Great Britain was still the leading imperial power and as such, the mainopinion leader and cultural "hegemon" of the time. The United States, on theother hand, was still by and large an isolated "new world"which fascinated theEuropean public, but whose concrete presence was very marginaL This isolationwas in part self-imposed by America's self-identification as being distinctly


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130 Praxis Internationalnon-European, perhaps even anti-European. Whereas Britain derived much of itsinternal legitimacy from being the center of a huge empire during the latter halfof the nineteenth century, America attained its legitimacy by being a new, selfcontained "frontier" society, independent of the mother country - unlike itsAustralian and Canadian cousins. This strong ambivalence towards Great Britain,manifesting itself in a clear affinity fostered by a common language and a disdainfor the old colonial master, whose very presence threatened the "new world 's"identity formation, greatly influenced the development of public discourse in theUnited States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This "special relationship", marked by both admiration and rejection, proved particularly significantin the realm of sportS. 16 As we will soon see, both football and baseballdeveloped into American sports par excellence within the framework of thisambivalent and largely one-sided dialogue which America conducted with Britainabout its ways. Both sports developed out of largely pre-industrial, "elite" Britishteam activities. Through complete bourgeoisification, they became adapted to anew, commercialized industrial order in a "new world". By the time Britain'sown mass sport, soccer, had been successfully exported all over the world,America's "sport space" was already occupied by former British imports nowconverted into genuine American games. Why was soccer "crowded out" in theUnited States? Firstly, the American bourgeoisie had successfully established itsown national game, baseball, which largely paralleled the timing of soccer'sdissemination as a mass sport in Great Britain. Secondly, young elites at the topAmerican universities were keener on playing - and then altering - what haddeveloped into a British "elite" sport (i.e. rugby) rather than expressing theiranglophilia by importing soccer which by that time had undergone a "vulgarization"similar to baseball's in the United States. In the following section, I will offerbriefdescriptions of the developments of soccer, football and baseball respectively,tracing the "massification" of each sport.The Development of Modern Soccer in Britain:From its elite origins to the world's most popular mass sportThe ancient and geographically diverse precursors to the game of soccer arewell documented. 17 In disparate parts of the world such as China, ancient Romeand Greece, India and the Americas, men would gather periodically and kick someround object to and away from each other. Whether it was the skull of a defeated

Danish enemy, as some English legend has it, or the stuffed bladder of a slaughteredanimal, people would somehow devise a "ball" with which they played. 18 Theseperiodic festivities, centred around a ball-like object, continued throughout Europe'sMiddle Ages, occurring virtually everywhere on the Continent as well as the BritishIsles. The game of calcio, hailing from Roman times, was the biggest "team sport"in Florence around 1500. 19 It was widely played in Italy in subsequent centuries,though - rather tellingly and in tandemwith the rest of the world - modem soccerin Italy stems entirely from the introduction ofAssociation Football by the Britishin the late 1800s/early 19OOs. 20 The medieval "precursor" to modem soccer wasa wild, disorganized free-far-all which often ended in riots, resulting in seriousinjuries and occasionally even death for some participants. That authorities more


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Praxis International 131often than not forbade the playing of football attests to the roughness of these riotousgames and also to their potential danger in seriously disrupting the public order.Nevertheless, these uncontrolled, disorganized "matches" which two opposingsides would try to control the "ball" by kicking, holding, running or throwingit, became regular occurrences on or around certain festivals. Best known in Englandwere the football games on Shrove Tuesday where crowds would gather annuallyto celebrate their last day of freedom before the strict and dour days of Lent. Thecontests in Ashbourne and Derby became legendary. In Derby, the "match"between the parishes of St. Peter and All Saints became such an intense tradition,that the term 5'derby" developed, connoting the institutionalized contest betweentwo long-standing, usually local rivals. 21 Through the export of modern Association Football, this English term, along with many others, became commplace inthe contemporary vernacular of some continental languages, such as German,Hungarian and Rumanian. These mass happenings had, in fact, little to do withwhat was to become modern Association Football or soccer. As James Walvinhas pointed out, this pre-modem form of mass entertainment virtually disappearedfrom the lives of the common people during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution only to re-emerge circa one hundred years later (i.e. during the 1880s) witha fervor and enthusiasm which was to conquer the entire world with the exceptionof the United States 25 years later. 22 In the intervening period, the upper stratumof the English bourgeoisie, aided by several far-reaching structural changesparticular to a new industrial age, turned this wild, disorganized and dangerousmedieval festival into the most popular modern team sport on earth.From the very beginning of its development, modern soccer became inextricablylinked to the most fundamental aspects of "modernization": discipline exactedby regulated industrial life; the strict separation of leisure and work; the necessityof organized and regularized recreation for the masses; cheap and efficient publictransportation by railroads (intercity) and by trolleys (intracity); prompt and widelyavailable mass communication via the press (introduction of the sport pages innewspapers), to be followed by telegrams (crucial for the development of nationwide betting), radio, and then television, and - perhaps most importantly - thedevelopment and rapid expansion of modern education.Though Wellington probably never said anything about Waterloo having beenwon on the playing fields ofEton, the fact that generations ofmiddle class Britonscherished this belief conveys the centrality of the so-called public schools to thedissemination of bourgeois culture in nineteenth century Britain.23 These publicschools, "ideal training grounds for merchants as well as aristocrats", formedthe cradle for soccer and rugby, the forerunner to American football. Starting inthe 18308, English intellectuals and educators became concerned with a completeeducation befitting the new industrial order. The goal was to produce not onlythe most efficient - but also the most well-rounded and thus fulfilled - lawyers,doctors, civil servants and scholars. Be they the ideas of "godliness and goodlearning" as articulated by Charles Kingsley or similar concepts put forth at varioustimes by thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer and John HenryNewman, the idea could best be summarized by that ubiquitous Latin phrase' 'menssana in corpore sano". 24 Organized sports had suddenly attained a central rolein the proper education of Great Britain's young, male, bourgeois elite. Best


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132 Praxis Internationaldescribed in the famous book Tom Brown's Schooldays published by ThomasHughes in 1857, it was in this atmosphere that modern soccer emerged.The game of football was played at all prestigious public schools, at both theold guard of Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Rugby, Westminster and Shrewsbury,or the new foundations ofCheltenham (1841), Marlborough (1843) andWellington(1853).25 Until the middle of the 1840s, each school basically played its ownversion of football, an intramural game with almost completely fluid rules. Therespective school's particular terrain dictated the kind of football played on thepremises. In schools such as Eton, Charterhouse and Westminster, which had onlynarrow "pitches" at their disposal, space restrictions favored the so-called"dribbling game" in which the use ofhands was completely eliminated. Harrovianfootball, not confined by space limitations but handicapped by drainage difficulties,also placed a premium on dribbling the ball, although catching it in the air or afteronly one bounce on the ground, was still pennitted. Conditions atWinchester encouraged "accurate kicking and dashing play" with the use of the hands also severelyrestricted. Rugby, followed by schools such as Cheltenham and Marlborough, wasthe main school at which the so-called "running game" developed. 26 Thecentrality of this sport to the students' overall educational experience at Rugbyin the 1830s is well-described in Chapter Five of Tom Brown's Schooldays. This

"running game" split from the "kicking and dribbling" game in 1863 anddeveloped into Rugby Football, the forerunner to both American and AustralianRules Football. The "kicking and dribbling" game became Association Football(soccer).27With the gradual extension of the national railway system by the mid-to-Iate1840s, the traditionally intramural game developed into an interscholastic contestin which games among the various public schools began to occur with some regularity. With the continued involvement of public school alumni in the game beyondtheir adolescence, football attained greater respectability and prestige. In additionto continued play at Oxbridge and the prestigious public schools throughout the1850s, the first clubs emerged at this time, all having been founded by ex-publicschool and/or Oxbridge men on a purely amateur basis largely in the south ofEngland. Still, the game remained disorganized, sporadic and unregulatedthroughout the 1850s. A set of comprehensive rules had become a necessity bythe early 1860s though, since the game of football had developed into a serioussport which reached beyond the confines of England's public schools.In 1862 J. C. Thring, assistant master ofUppingham and one of two Shrewsburygraduates to form the first football team at Cambridge in 1846, issued a set ofrules known as "The Simplest Game". 28 Streamlining all the rules into tenpoints, Thring's step - although initially only considered for use at Uppingham- represented a major development in making football an easily transferable,ubiquitously applicable game. A lively reaction and revision process followed duringwhich the 14 points of the Cambridge University Rules of 1863 originated. OnMonday, October 26, 1863 the Football Association (F.A.) was founded at theFreemason's Tavern on Great Queen Street in London and proceeded to decreefootball's 13 "laws" .29 These "laws" - in notable contrast to the earlier "rules"- govern the world's most popular sport to this day virtually unchanged. Rule 9(' 'No player shall run with the ball. ") and Rule 10 (' 'Neither tripping or hacking


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Praxis International 133shall be allowed, and no player shall use his hands to hold or push his adversary. ")especially dismayed the still numerous supporters of the "running game". Thecleavage between these two increasingly different versions of football became sopronounced during the 1860s that by 1871 the supporters of the "running game"formed their own association. Entitled the Rugby Union, it completely finalizedrugby's seccession from Association Football and initiated the establishment ofthe "running game" as an independent sport sui generis.In the same year the F.A., which to this day is the sole organizing body ofEnglishsoccer, began organizing its first comprehensive tournament including all Englishclubs and culminating in a final match between the last two remaining teams forthe F.A. Cup. Held in London every year since 1872, the Cup final still representsa higWight of the English soccer season and draws much attention on the Continentas well, due to the tremendous respect accorded there to the oldest soccer tournamentin the motherland of this sport. Until 1882, the Cup Final was invariably playedbetween two strictly amateur clubs from England's south. Moreover, most of theplayers were "gentlemen" who had attended one of the public schools, Oxbridge,or both. This was to change for good in 1882 when a semi-professional team fromEngland's north, the Blackburn Rovers, played the Old Etonians for the CUp.3DWon by the southern gentlemen for the last time, the Cup moved northward asof 1883 (won by another Blackburn team, the Olympic), regained only once bya London club during the next 32 years. This hegemony of the North and theMidlands in English football signaled the demise of the exclusive "gentlemen'sera" in soccer and the concomitant arrival of the game's professionalization andcommercialization - in short, democratization."Among the Blackbumplayers were three weavers, a spinner, a dental assistant,a plumber, a cotton operative and an iron foundry worker. "31 Throughout the1870s and into the 1880s, soccer rapidly developed into a working class sport.Churches in particular, seeing soccer as an ideal vehicle to combat urban problems, spawned clubs all over the country. Followed by schools, neighborhoodassociations and factories, the game soon developed into Great Britain's mostubiquitous sport, having by that time also proliferated into the non-English partsof the British Isles. Lastly, some teams developed as de facto "winter branches"of already existing cricket clubs, thereby extending the sport season for theirmembers to a year-round involvement. This rapid proliferation of soccer in littlemore than a decade was intimately related to the nature of the game itself. Pridingitself as "the simplest game", soccer's rules were indeed few, clear and easilycommunicable to players and spectators alike. In terms of equipment, all thatwas needed was a ball and a relatively flat surface. Everything else - goalposts, nets, lines demarcating the field and special areas on it, boots and uniforms- was (and in certain ways still is) not absolutely essential for a soccer match.Perhaps the most important "democratizing" factor was the early awareness thataverage physical attributes sufficed not only to be an adequate soccer playerbut also a star. Just as the player(s) with the best physical attributes could notcontrol the flow and outcome of the game, neither could the most intelligent, wilyor wealthy. Indeed, it soon became evident that successful soccer always had tobe a team effort in which no one individual could ever exert sufficient controlto decide a game completely by himself. With the development of the passing game


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134 Praxis Internationalin the 1880s, soccer's collectivist identity became irreversibly established.By the mid 1880s, many factors contributed to the rapid rise of professionalismand the concomitant disappearance of amateurism in British soccer: regular newspaper coverage of the games; increased intercity matches among clubs, expandedand modernized playing fields, surrounded by viewing areas for a growing numberof fans who paid admission fees; and the newly introduced work-free Saturdayafternoons. This shift from amateurism to professionalism entailed a sociologicalchange in the class background of soccer players as well as fans. As to the former,a poor working class youth from some Midland industrial slum would clearly seizeevery opportunity to make a better living by being paid for what essentially stillremained his hobby. As to the latter, a parallel "downward" shift in class composition occurred during the 1880s, which led to a "crowding out" of the Englishgentlemen by the working class from both the playing and viewing dimensionsof the soccer world. Walvin claims that during this time quite a few English soccerfans and players with bourgeois backgrounds snubbed soccer as an increasinglyprofessional and "vulgar" sport and then pursued their ambitions as amateursportsmen in other games, such as rugby.With the establishment of the English Football League in 1888, followed by asecond division in 1892, the present structure of English professional soccer wasestablished in its essential contours. This format of league play shaped the game ofsoccer in every country where it became the central sport. The need to maximizeprofits on the increasingly expensive investments which these professional clubsbegan to represent, was met neither by "friendly" matches on an irregular basisnor by the potentially one-time involvement in the F.A. Cup tournament. Thereforethe Football League developed. Its twelve original members - all from England'snorth and theMidlands - would compete for the League championship by playinga continuous round-robin tournament in which each team would play every otherteam twice, once "at home" and once "away". By the early 1890s, English football- as the world has come to know it - was fully established in Great Britain. Itwas poised to conquer the world, a hitherto unparalleled feat in sports history.Soccer enjoyed a "national", i.e. class-transcendent, appeal in Britain by thelate nineteenth century in spite of its professionalized "vulgarization" during the1880s and 1890s. This fact, together with the ubiquity and prominence of Britishpresence throughout the world during this period, helps to explain the exportabilityof soccer. It is telling that the sport was introduced to many countries by an eclecticgroup of people: visiting English sailors (France, Spain, Brazil); British embassypersonnel (Sweden); British workers engaged in local projects (Russia, Rumania,Poland, Uruguay); local schoolboys bringing the game back with them followingthe completion of their education in England (Holland, Italy, Spain, Brazil,Portugal); and members of local English clubs which expanded their sport activitiesfrom cricket and horseback riding to soccer (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany,Argentina). Aided by a proliferation of coaches and other officials imported fromEngland and Scotland, and by frequent "missionary" visits from English clubswho would tour the respective country playing exhibitionmatches against its newlyfounded teams, soccer quickly became the most dominant team sport on theEuropean continent and in Latin America by the eve ofWorld War I. Developmentsin the United States, conversely, proved a good deal less fortuitous for soccer.


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Praxis International 135In America, soccer remained closely associated with immigrants, a stigmawhichproved fatal to soccer's potential of becoming a popular team sport in the' 'new

world". The game's various precursors were played in the colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with documentation of a game as early as 1609in Virginia. 32 As in England, football was played on the streets and in opensquares, often leading to riot-like disturbances which, in turn, led the authoritiesto forbid the game on a number of occasions. Again similar to England, the gamedid not attain any social respectability until the first half of the nineteenth century,when the nation's top colleges - led by Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia- started playing various versions of football on an intramural basis. Outlawedperiodically by university administrators because of its raucous nature and accompanying roughness both on and off the field, the game did not become organizeduntil the 1860s. Early in this decade, students and alumni from a number of eliteBoston secondary schools united to form the Oneida Football Club which remainedundefeated - and even unscored upon - between 1862 and 1865, lending the"Boston Game" exceptional prominence in America's still small, diverse footballworld. 33 Allowing the use of hands and feet, the "Boston Game" soon becamethe most popular sport across the Charles River in Cambridge, home of HarvardUniversity. Retrospectively, this synthesis may have proved an early harbingerfor soccer 's failure to become a major popular sport at American colleges, andsubsequently in American society as a whole.By the end of the decade, the game had achieved sufficient intercollegiateuniformity to allow for the playing of the first college football game in Americanhistory, which was held on Saturday, November 6, 1869 in New Brunswick betweenRutgers and Princeton. This event can be classified both as the first football aswell as the first soccer game in modern American history since the game was playedaccording to rules which were somewhere in between those of Association andRugby Football. 34 Columbia joined the original two in 1870 and by 1872 thegroup included Rutgers, Princetoll, Yale and Stevens. These schools played anAssociation-type kicking game. Even though local differences in rules persisted,all participants agreed that the ball could not be picked up with the hands, caught,thrown or carried. Soccer in its rudimentary form seemed to have assumed animportant foothold among leading American colleges. It failed to do so at thecountry's oldest and most prestigious institution of higher learning though: Harvardpersistently opposed the "kicking game", clinging tenaciously to its "BostonGame" which it had perfected in the interim. 35 When the other schools uniformlyadopted Association rules in 1873, they desisted from calling themselves a leaguedue to Harvard' s absence. Indeed, the unique prestige of this very special institu

tion ultimately overturned the "kicking game's" apparent victory among Americancollege students of the early 1870s and led to the running game's complete andultimate triumph by 1877. In search of an opponent, Harvard turned north of theborder to McGill University which played rugby at the time. The two universitiesagreed to play two matches in 1874, the first according to the rules of Harvard's"Boston Game", the second following McGill's rugby rules. As expected, Harvardwon the first encounter easily and was poised to lose the rematch to McGill.Surprisingly, the Harvard team played McGi11 to a scoreless tie. 36 Moreimportant than this unexpected and respectable result for soccer's future, was the


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136 Praxis InternationalHarvard team's unanimous enthusiasmfor the game of rugby which the players henceforth embraced wholeheartedly as their own. The "Boston Game", having been ahybrid between rugby and soccer and thus still including more kicking and footinvolved ball contact than rugby, was dismissed as sleepy and boring. In its stead, the"running game" developed in its then purest form as Harvard's unchallenged teamsport. Barely one year later, in 1875, Yale's well-established rivalry with Harvardproved stronger than its membership in a loose association with Columbia, Princetonand a few other schools then playing the "kicking game". In that year the first"Game" between Yale and Harvard was played, with Harvard winning easilyin a game Yale had never played until then. That year Yale still fulfilled its" soccerobligations" to Columbia and Wesleyan, but by 1876 Yale had dropped soccerand replaced it with rugby. The other universities followed, with Princeton succumbing last in 1877. Rugby's triumph over soccer at American colleges was sothorough that soccer did not reappear on American campuses on an intercollegeiatelevel until 1902. By that time American Football- rugby's successor in the "newworld" - had gained an unshakable prominence in American college life. 37Stigmatized as slow, boring and devoid of action due to the relative paucity ofscoring when compared to any of the "Big Three" American sports, soccer has,since its re-introduction as a varsity sport, languished in the giant shadows caston it by football and later basketball. At American universities, as in Americansociety, soccer has remained largely the domain of foreigners and recent immigrants,both as players and spectators. Let us now look at the developments of footballand baseball respectively, so we can better understand what occupied the American"sport space" upon soccer's arrival on these shores and how this "preoccupation"led to the "crowding out" of the world's most popular sport. Since we just discussedthe origins of American football in the context of soccer's failure in the UnitedStates, it seems best to continue the paper by looking at football before turningto baseball."Crowding Out From Above": The case of American footballWhat Harvard had started by sticking to the running game, Yale completed byoffering football its charismatic "founding father" and most influential modernizer.

Indeed, Parke Davis, "the Plutarch of early college football", explicitly equatedWaIter Camp of Yale to George Washington by stating that "what Washingtonwas to his country, Camp was to American football - the friend, the founder,and the father." 38 Attaining legendary fame as a player and reformer during thegame's most formative years, Camp "was said to have been the model for thefictional character 'FrankMerriwell ofYale' " , America's first and greatest sportshero on whom a whole generation of American boys was weaned after 1896. 39Camp's major and lasting contribution was to transform football from a quasi

aristocratic English game to a quintessentially bourgeois American activity of thetwentieth century. Astute observers ofAmerican sports and culture such as DavidRiesman and Michael Oriard have drawn explicit parallels between Waiter Campand Frederick Winslow Taylor. 40 Simultaneously, though presumably independently of each other, both were engaged in the modernization, regularization and


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Praxis International 137systematization their respective fields - football and factory production - whichwere undergoing far-reaching changes ofbourgeoisification (and Americanization)at the turn of the century. Waiter Camp could be described as the leading figurein the ' 'Taylorization" of a sport which, following the successful conclusion ofthis process, clearly emerged as American football. Under Camp's leadership,rugby's ad hoc and free-for-all scramble for the ball, the unpredictable English, 'scrum' " became the clearly delineated American "scrimmage", in which theoffensive and defensive teams confronted each other. Confusion and ambiguitystill continued however with both sides vying for the ball simultaneously at thebeginning of each play, often tying up the ball and thereby impeding the commencement of the game. Therefore further clarification was added by awarding whatwas to become the "center snap" to the offensive team. Undisputed possessionof the ball was thus established. Camp and his reformers "taylorized" the fieldby drawing clear lines on it, making a team's progress, movement and locationperfectly measurable at any time of the game. The gridiron - in and of itself aTaylorist concept - set the stage for football's subsequent and lasting dominationby statistics (yards per carry; total passing yardage; total running yardage; etc.).In order to regulate and encourage movement on the gridiron, and to counter the"block game" in which each team would keep the ball for "its" half of the game,Camp introduced a rule requiring a team to make five yards in three downs, extendedto ten yards in four downs in 1912. 41 Camp reduced the number of players perteam from 15 to 11 and each player was assigned a specific position in which hewas expected to excel and specialize. He devised the arrangement which becamestandard - seven linemen, a quarterback, two halfbacks, and a fullback. As partof his "scientization" of football in which game plans, strategy, and tactics assumedan increasingly central role, Camp also introduced a rule which permitted tacklingas low as the knees. This maneuver to bring a man down was more efficient, thoughalso more brutal, than the earlier method of wrestl ing an opponent to the ground.The dangerous "wedge" appeared, perfected by Harvard to become the moredevastating "flying wedge", only to be countered by Camp's Yale teams withthe "shoving wedge". Play became violent, routinely resulting in major injuriesand frequent deaths. Finally President Roosevelt, having seen the photo of a mangledSwarthmore player in the newspaper following a particularly savage encounterbetween Swarthrnore and Pennsylvania in 1905, personally demanded that the gamebe reformed to eliminate such obvious brutality. Only thereafter did Camp andothers institute changes which eliminated overt and willful maiming without,however, compromising the roughness of the game which was deemed essentialby virtually every educator and opinion leader in the country. President Roosevelt'sinvolvement led to the establishment of the Intercollegiate Athletic Associationin December 1905, headed by Captain Palmer Pierce ofWest Point. It was renamedthe National Collegiate Athletic Association (N.C.A.A.) in 1910. With WaIterCamp in charge of the American Football Rules Committee, the last substantialrule changes were undertaken yielding a game by the eve ofWorld War I whichhas basically remained intact on both the collegiate and the professional levelsto this day. One of the most important reforms was the forward pass which established the "aerial attack'" as yet another weapon in a team's offensive strategy.This reform fostered the honing of finesse and precision at the expense of sheer


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138 Praxis Internationalphysical force, thus further contributing to what had already become a highly"taylorized" sport.Baseball had become the sport of the lower classes, "enjoying" the social prestigeof stage acting or gambling in Michael Oriard's words. Football developed intothe most popular sport among America's middle class by the turn of the centurywhen soccer made its triumphant conquest of the European continent and LatinAmerica. 42 Initially dominant only in the elite schools of the East Coast, footballrapidly spread westward establishing itself at places such as the University ofChicago (coached by the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg), Oberlin, Michigan andNotre Dame in the Midwest, Stanford and the University ofCalifornia at Berkeleyon the West Coast. The 1920s witnessed the proliferation of college football inthe South and the Southwest, with both regions producing major powers bythe 1940s.That football remained the virtual prerogative of collegiate America, underscoredthe middle class nature of football's first four decades. Football games on Saturdayafternoons in the fall, especially around Thanksgiving, became essential ingredients ofAmerican bourgeois culture. College football attained such a hegemonicposition in American middle class culture, that it succeeded in "crowding out"the professional game - as well as soccer - until the founding of the NationalFootball League in 1920, and arguably well into the post-World War 11 era.Professionalism did not however remain excluded from the world of Americanfootball. One aspect of the mens-sana-in-corpore-sano ideology of the Americanbourgeoisie was the perception of football as a bastion of amateurism, in fact though,professionalization of the college game had clearly set in by the turn of the century.Gate receipts provided welcome revenue even to the wealthiest universities suchas Yale, where in 1903 "income from football equaled the combined budgets ofthe law, divinity, and medical schools".43 Yale was the first university to professionalize its coaching staff and its rivals, initially protesting this vulgar betrayalof amateur ideals, proceeded to hire their own professional coaches. Staying competitive was critical for winning, which had graduated from being everything tobeing the only thing.The explicitly professional football game originated in the cultural peripheries

ofAmerica's steel and coal regions, such as Pittsburgh and the surrounding areasofAllegheny County. Spreading later to the industrial regions ofOhio, professionalclubs were established in towns such as Akron and Canton (the location of theProfessional Football Hall of Fame). Most teams were owned by wealthybusinessmen who liked the game, wanted to provide some entertainment to thelocal population (which often included a disproportionately large number of theirown employees) and make some money in the process. Initially, most players werelocal working class members with an occasional college graduate hired as the specialstar, as was the case with the legendary William WaIter (Pudge) Heffelfinger,Amos Alonzo Stagg's teammate at Yale. With the gradual growth of the professionalgame and its departure from America's hinterlands into the country's cultural centersthough, college graduates began to furnish the majority of the players. A situationdeveloped where American universities served as professional football's farmsystem, a function which they still perform. American higher education - anessential institution of American bourgeois life - continues its deep involvement


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Praxis International 139with football true to its legacy as the cradle and inventor of this quintessentiallyAmerican sport.44All those involved in football (the players, fans, coaches and team owners) cameto view the game not only as profoundly American, but also as fundamentally

modem contrasting it favorably to that other American sport - i.e. baseball. This ledto the erroneous but still powerful myth which continues to glorify baseball as arural game. Baseball having developed into America's "pastime" populated by thecountry's masses, seemingly lacked the vigor and drive ofmodernity associated withfootball's "scientific" aura. Rather than cultivating the leisurely image of a"pastime", football prided itself on replicating the tough, strategic, determinedand ultimately victorious side of American life. Football prominently featured allthe values central to bourgeois capitalism in the United States: British elite originsto provide the necessary historical legitimacy coupled with American "robustmanliness" to distinguish it clearly from its "soft" , disorganized, Victorian predecessor;45 individual effort combined with intricate team work; hierarchical controlin tandem with corporate cooperation; and equality of opportunity and accessaccompanied by the survival of the fittest. 46Just like American capitalism, so too was football made bearable by the' 'rules ofthe game". In notable contrast to both soccer and rugby, American football - likebaseball - developed a mass of intricate rules which served as a lingua franca for thesport in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society dominated by bourgeois values ofindividualism rather than the noblesse oblige collectivism of the British aristocratizedsports world. Whereas a common culture among players - and between players andspectators - permitted British sports to develop with a minimal system ofpolicing, asimilar self-regulating approachwas impossible in a country with a constant influx ofnew immigrants, who had the importance ofbeing number one impressed upon themon arrival. In addition to providing a common ground of understanding, rules alsohelped systematize and quantify American sports. The performance of a team, as wellas of the individual, could bemore' 'objectively" measured than in the murky, collectivist British team sports. One could thus tie remuneration, advancement or demotionto a player's "numbers", analogous to the reward system in a Taylorized form ofindustrial production. The existence ofwritten - as opposed to culturally internalized- rules also fostered an atmosphere in which a premium was attached to devising"trick plays" , designed to mislead consciously the opponent by staying just this sideofwhat the rules permitted or indeed by violating them outright in the hope that thepolicing authorities would not notice. "Trick plays' " basically unknown to soccer,rugby and cricket, became woven into the fabric ofAmerican football and baseball.Lastly - as in politics - clearly stated, written and universalistic rule had an equalizingeffect on American football by enhancing its attraction to otherwise disparate socialgroups. Rules thereby enhanced participation and contributed to the popularization- if perhaps less to the democratization - of this sport. It is now time to turn toAmerica's earliest popular sport which helped "crowd out soccer from below".Crowding Out From Below: The case of baseballPurportedly, Jacques Barzun once said, "Whoever wants to know the heart and

mind ofAmerica had better learn baseball". UntiI the 1950s, baseball was far and


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140 Praxis Internationalaway America's most popular sport. From the very beginning of its development,baseball's successful proliferation among America's nlasses depended on its identityas "American". Football never denied its British origins and indeed proudly pointedto William Webb Ellis' alleged run at Rugby in 1823 as the inception of the game.In contrast, baseball went to great length to deny having had any relationship tothe British game of rounders, all the while stressing the truly "Americanness"of the game's every facet. In this context, the still widely held myth of AbnerDoubleday having originated the game in Cooperstown, New York in 1839 wascreated. To the enthusiastic cries of "No rounders!", a group of 300 prominentbaseball enthusiasts, including Mark Twain and Chauncey M. Depew, gatheredat Delmonico's in New York City in 1889 to hear the fourth presIdent of the NationalLeague, Abraham G. Mills, declare that' 'patriotism and research" had establishedbeyond any doubt the American origin of Baseball. 47 The creation of the AbnerDoubledaymyth was to squelch forever the British claim that baseball was a descendant of rounders. Baseball's "devotees found it increasingly difficult to swallowthe idea that their favorite pastime was of foreign origin. Pride and patriotismrequired that the game be native, unsullied by English ancestry." 48 IntenseAmerican nativism, apparent already during baseball's "take-off period" in the1850s, ensured baseball's eventual success as "'the American National Game".Ties to rounders were consciously denied and baseball was systematically definedas "anti-cricket": faster, more action-packed, tougher, requiring more ingenuityand individual initiative. In short, baseball was better suited to and more accuratelyreflected life in the "New World".The following analysis will focus on the evolution of baseball as a game andas a national institution in a curious temporal parallel to soccer's development inEngland. Baseball's tempestuous era - reflecting central conflicts in Americansociety of the late nineteenth century - came to a more or less accepted conclusionby 1903, at the exact time of soccer's conquest of the world. Having developedinto America's mass sport and national pastime between the end of the Civil Warand the turn of the century, baseball had successfully ensconced itself in America's, 'sport space". Thus little room remained for soccer to develop on the popularlevel, as it did first in Great Britain, then on the European Continent and in LatinAmerica, and eventually in the rest of the world.Baseball's precursors stretch back to America's colonial period when an arrayof games with names such as "town-ball" and "round-ball" were played on villagegreens primarily in New England and New York. Completely regional in character- as attested to by such names as the '" Massachusetts Game", '" New EnglandGame" and "New York Game" - virtually all of baseball's forerunners hailedfrom the British game of rounders in which a batter would "'round" the bases- or "goals" - after having "struck" the ball which was thrown to him by a"bowler" belonging to the opposite team. In an interesting and lasting parallelto soccer, baseball's success was in part based on the fact that virtually no equipmentor special physical attributes were necessary to enjoy or excel at the game. Likesoccer, baseball thus enjoyed "democratic access" in that the game was accessibleto all and no exotic equipment or locale were required. 49 Any elongated bat-likeobject, be it a broomstick, paddle or rifle, served adequately for hitting the ball.Any vaguely round object - regardless of exact size and consistency - could serve


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Praxis International 141as a ball. Versions of this game - involving hitting and throwing a ball and running"the bases" - proliferated in the northeast of the United States in the 1830s and1840s.Like football (as yet undifferentiated into Association and Rugby), the initialand all-important codification of baseball occurred in the quasi-aristocratic milieu

of educated gentlemen. In 1845 a group of 40 bourgeois male New Yorkers (professional men, merchants, white collar workers and several "gentlemen") joinedtogether in forming the New York Knickerbockers, the world's first organizedbaseball team. 50 Under the leadership of Alexander Cartwright, the Knickerbockers created the first written rules of baseball. Despite constant changes since,these rules have provided the main contours of the game to this day: the four-basediamond; 90-foot base paths; three out, all out; batting in rotation; throwing outrunners or touching them; nine-man teams with each player covering a definiteposition; and the location of the pitcher's box in relation to the diamond as a wholeto mention but the most important ones. 51 Cartwright and his reformers alsospecified the weight of the ball as well as the circumference of the bat in orderto provide uniformity for competition. The Knickerbockers played their first gameat Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey against the New York Base Ball Clubon June 19, 1846. In that same year, J. C. Thring, one of soccer's major codifiers,organized the first football team at Cambridge. The baseball game lasted only fourinnings, "because by that time the New York Club had scored the 21 'aces' (runs)necessary to win under the rules". Also an elaborate social affair, the ensuingdinner assumed almost equal importance to the contest on the field. This traditioncontinued until the end of the next decade as other teams joined the Knickerbockersin New York (notably the Gothams, Eagles and Empires) as well as in Brooklyn(The Excelsiors, Putnams, Eckfords and Atlantics) and competed in a series ofregular games held on an inter- as well as intra-city basis. In 1858 a team ofManhattan all-stars first played their Brooklyn counterparts and thereby inaugurateda rivalry which was to last exactly one hundred years.Throughout the 1850s, baseball caught the fancy of people in all walks of lifeleading to a proliferation of clubs organized largely along occupational lines.Policemen, barkeepers, schoolteachers, doctors, lawyers and even clergymen hadtheir own team. This rapid "downward" dissemination led to baseball's develop

ment first as "New York's game", then the "Northeast's game" and ultimately"America's game" following the conclusion of the Civil War. Since baseball wasmost popular and its rules most codified in New York, what was known as the"New York game" became nationally accepted by 1860. As with football inEngland at that time, the increased facility and expansion of railroad travel fosteredintercity contests. Moreover, the growing availability of newspapers, in whichthe first regular sports pages appeared, also helped the game's popularity duringa critical formative period.A fundamental transformation of the game accompanied this geographic andsocial expansion. Though still dominated by amateurs, competition became keener.Winning, which had been accorded only incidental status during baseball's"gentlemen era", developed into the game's raison d'etre. Gone was the viewwhich allowed each batter to have "his hit". The central aspect ofmodern baseballdeveloped, which dictated a fundamentally and structurally antagonistic relationship


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142 Praxis Internationalbetween the pitcher and the batter. The pitcher was no longer to "serve" the battera "hittable" ball, but in fact do just the opposite. By trying to make it as difficultas possible for the batter to hit the ball, pitchers developed fastballs, curves, slidersand various breaking pitches to confuse, mislead and basically trick the batter whoserepeated failure to "strike" the ball would lead to his forfeiting his role as a batter.To keep pitchers from throwing balls out of the batters' reach, the system of "balls"was invented whereby the batter was allowed to advance to first base in case thepitcher exceeded his permitted allotment of throwing "faulty" balls. Baseball'santi-English, anti-cricket self-identification increased with the game's gradualdistancing from its amateur roots. This nativist strain was also evident in certainrule changes such as the elimination of making an "out" by catching a batter'shit on one bounce, which was associated with the more serene, slower andgentlemanly cricket. "Surely, what an Englishman can do, an American is ascapable of improving upon", boasted a sporting paper52 and thus this "archaic"rule was relegated to baseball's "muffins", as amateurs became known in the daysof the game's increased professionalization. Gate receipts developed into animportant source of revenue for the clubs, leading to baseball's "enclosuremovement". Fences provided a clear separation between "ball parks" and theoutside world. They also helped separate spectators from players, providing a moreorderly spatial arrangement for a rather unruly crowd. Last, but certainly not least,these "enclosures" eventually led to the institutionalization of the "home run" ,one of baseball's most exciting events.With victory assuming paramount importance, professionalism rapidly displacedamateurism during the post-Civil War era. While every team had its share of, 'rounders" (baseball's equivalent to football's "ringers") who "revolved" fromone team to the next following the most lucrative offer with reckless abandon ofany team loyalty or moral constraints, in 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockingsappeared as the first official all-professional team in baseball, indeed in any modernsport. Two years later, the first professional league, the National Association ofProfessional Base Ball Players, was established. Lasting only four years andrepresenting 10 teams, this league was dominated by the Red Stockings who hadmoved from Cincinnati to Boston. Best described as the most unregulated capitalistphase of baseball, the charismatic entrepreneur, best represented by Albert GoodwillSpalding, the pitching star of the Boston Red Stockings, characterized this earlyera. Spalding, typical of entrepreneurs in America's burgeoning bourgeois society,was a missionary, modernizer and moneymaker all rolled into one. By furtherstandardizing the game's equipment (balls, bats, uniforms) Spalding continuedto develop the modern game of baseball while simultaneously helping his sportinggoods business become a flourishing enterprise. His missionary zeal to spreadbaseball - and also the wares of his company - extended beyond the confines ofthe United States. Having returned from a triumphant baseball tour of Canada,Spalding "conceived the idea in 1873 of taking a baseball team over to Englandto demonstrate what the Americans had cooked up out of rounders crossed withcricket. "53 His conviction that the superior American game would inevitablycatch on with the English during a number of exhibition matches played in 1874proved utterly illusory. Baseball did not excite the British who found it dull andhardly a worthy departure from the children's game of rounders. Conveying the


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Praxis International 143unbound optimism of that special breed of American entrepreneur, Spaldingremained undeterred by his failed mission of 1874 and embarked on a second, evenmore ambitious, journey in 1888/89 to bring baseball to the rest of the world.He took an all-star team called "All Americans" to Hawaii, Australia, Egypt,Italy, France and England. The results were even more embarrassing for baseballthan during the first trip though. Other than in Australia where the game met witha polite but unenthusiastic reception, baseball was greeted with a mixture ofdisinterest, derision and even hostility on the team's other stops. Italian and Frenchspectators found the game dull and uninspiring. The British still dismissed it asthe American version of rounders, though some particularly benevolent criticsconceded that baseball was faster and more scientific. 54 Not until the mid 1920sdid baseball's prophets once again embark on a proselytizing mission which - withthe exception of attaining positive results in Japan - failed abysmally once again.Three explanations seem plausible for baseball's failure to capture the imagination of sports fans outside the United States and its immediate geographic orbit.First, its "Americanness" not only rendered it incomprehensible outside its culturalcontext, but also lent it a real - albeit unjustified - aura of immaturity and vulgarity,particularly in British eyes. Second, the 1888/89 trip occurred at a time when thesecountries were still insufficiently bourgeoisified to embrace a sport on a mass level.This had already happened with baseball in the United States and soccer in GreatBritain, but these other countries were not yet ready for it. Third, the 1920sexpedition failed because soccer vvas already well ensconced as the premier masssport in the world, and "crowded out" any serious competition. The one notableexception, where the baseball rrrission actually proved rather successful, was Japan.Returning to baseball's unregulated capitalist phase of the early 1870s, this erawitnessed open gambling and drinking among the spectators and players before,during and after the games. Players, as well as umpires, accepted bribes to "fix"games in full view of the public. The generally anarchic atmosphere was heightenedby the common practice of "raiding" players. A club had been "raided", if someof its top players, whom it had barely signed a few weeks before, disappearedfrom its roster only to show up in a rival team's uniform the next day. By themid 1870s all involved saw that baseball was in dire need of some sort of streamlining. Begun in 1876, this process lasted until 1903 when the present organizationalform of major league baseball was established.Led by Spalding, baseball's "domestication" commenced with the founding ofthe National League in 1876, the world's oldest still functioning professional sportsleague, predating the English Football League by twelve years. The National Leaguewas limited to eight clubs. Each was guaranteed "territorial rights" by being thesole representatives of a city which had at least 75,000 inhabitants. In additionto this important monopolistic market position, clubs agreed to refrain from"raiding" each other's players by introducing the so-called' 'reserve clause". Thiscartel-like agreement, which lasted nearly one century, gave each club complete,quasi-feudal control over its players by giving it a continuing option to rehire themeach year and thus prevent them from selling their labor power to the highest bidderin the free market. 55 Players thus became a team's property, a serf-like arrangement common to other professional sports with mass appeal, such as soccer.With baseball having become America's most popular form of entertainment by


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144 Praxis Internationalthe early 1880s, other entrepreneurs saw the sport as an excellent venue to makemoney. Therefore the rival American Association developed in 1882, its eightteams charging lower admissions than their counterparts in the National Leagueand playing on Sundays. 56 Periodic trade wars, benefitting fans and players,ensued between the two rival leagues. The result was the eventual demise of theAmerican Association in 1891 and the absorption of four of its teams by the NationalLeague, thereafter comprised of twelve clubs.In addition to trade wars, another occasional occurrence in the baseball of thelate nineteenth century further strengthens our analogy with feudalism. Just as therewere numerous, destructive, peasant revolts which brought about few tangible gainsfor the peasants in the Middle Ages, so too did baseball players conduct periodiccostly "wars" against the owners leading only to minor attainments for the players'cause. Efforts to unionize were invariably defeated and the owner-imposed "reserveclause" successfully stymied the players' attempts to use their market power togain better conditions and, more importantly, to enhance their control over theirown existence in baseball.After a trade war at the turn of the century, the National League, weakenedby internal strife and the jettisoning of four of its clubs, entered into a peace agreement with the newly formed American League forming the pinnacle ofwhat becamehenceforth the cartel of "Organized Baseball". The peace agreement between the

two leagues led to the establishment of the World Series57 and an arrangementin which the sixteen major league teams (eight in each league) represented tencities. This format lasted for fifty years until the Boston Braves of the NationalLeague transferred to Milwaukee, thereby sparking a period of relocation and theestablishment of new franchises which continued until the 1970s. Following anotherorganizational restructuring in the wake of the 1919 "Black Sax" World Seriesscandal, "Organized Baseball" was led by a single commissioner beginning in1920. The game entered its golden era which not evenWorldWar II could interrupt.With the gradual proliferation of radio broadcasting during the 1920s, the establishment of the "Yankee dynasty" and the introduction of night games in 1935, baseballachieved an unchallenged hegemony in American sports. Not until professionalfootball's meteoric rise in the 1960s was that hegemony challenged. Baseball'soverwhelming popularity with the American masses proved sufficient to "crowdout" soccer "from below" in the United States.ConclusionThis paper argues that the particular nature of America's development as "thefirst new nation" contributed considerably to the "crowding out" of soccer asone of this country's major spectator sports. Specifically, it is this essay's contention that some of the most salient social and historical constellations which ledto the absence of a large working-class party in the United States, making it the

world's only advanced industrial country to suffer from this considerable deficitin the conduct of its politics, also helped exclude the United States from the world'smost popular mass sport. It was above all America's early and comprehensivebourgeoisification - as myth and reality - which created both "exceptionalisms"whose legacies are with us to this day.


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Praxis 145Just as the on why there is no socialism in America mainly focuses

on the period between the Civil War War I, so too did I concentratemuch of this paper's empirical on the pre-1914 era. As such, any seriousconcern with either one - or - of the two "exceptionalisms'" demands bynecessity a historical approach since it was at a certain era of American development the overall stage was set. The overall contours of this stage have byand large renlained intact. a thorough historical exploration of topics suchas the two American "exceptionalisms" not only helps us understand their originsbut also their continued presence in our world.This, of course, is not to say that an understanding of the pre-World War Isituation remains sufficient as an explanation for the failure of socialism and/orsoccer in contemporary America. Surely one would have to spend some time

analyzing the phenomena of Stalinism andMcCarthyism - just to mention perhapsthe most obvious cases - for a proper analysis of the continued absence of a large,mass-based, left-leaning party in the United States of the 1980s. Similarly, soccer'smarginal existence as a major spectator sport in contemporary America has probablya lot more to do with its inability to land a long-term television contract with oneof the major networks, than with it being "crowded out" by baseball "from below"and football "from above" before the turn of the century. Yet, the very fact thatnone of the networks has ever been willing to extend such a contract harkens backto an era when public tastes in mass sports were formed all over the world andbestowed with a remarkable endurance. In that, even the United States cannot claimto be an exception.

NOTES* Thanks to Michael Oriard for letting n1e see his work in progress and sharing his extensiveknowledge with Ine. Space restrictions necessitated the deletion of extensive documentation whichaccompanies the original version of this article. Upon request, I would be glad to supply the interestedreader with the unabridged paper.1. I would like to draw the reader's attention in this context to Paul Hoch's very useful termof "sexual apartheid" denoting the fact that sports often transcend the many lines of demarcation(be they class, status, ethnicity or religion) among men only to exclude women almost completely.It is interesting to note that this phenomenon of "sexual apartheid" is virtually ubiquitous all overthe world. See Paul Hoch, Ripp off the Big Ganze: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite(New York, 1972), 147-66.2. While it is very difficult to obtain reliable data on how many people watched the World Cups

of 1978, 1982 and 1986 respectively, there can be little doubt that these events have hitherto attractedmore television viewers than anything else in human history. More than 2 billion people watchedthe World Cup final in 1978 with the figures being 3 billion and 3.5 billion for the same event in1982 and 1986 respectively. Over 5 billion people watched the entire tournament in 1982 and 8 billionfollowed it four years later. (All these f igures were obtained from the Secretariat of the FederationInternationale de Football Association (FIFA) in Zurich.) In substantiating her point that socceris far and away the world's most popular spectator sport, Janet Lever in her excellent study on soccerin Brazil states the following about the final game of the 1978 World Cup: 'In other words, nearlyhalf the l1J'orld's people shared a single event. (Emphasis in the original) . . . To put this figure inperspective, the combined audience for two weeks of Olympic events was one billion people in 1976."See Janet Lever, Soccer Madness (Chicago, 1983), 20.3. The television data corroborating this point are overwehlming. World Cup events remainedconfined to the realm of esoterica and immigrant subcultures when compared to such mainstaysof American sports as the World Series (baseball), the Superbowl (football) and the NBA championship series (basketball).


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Praxis International 1464. The original ti tle of Sombart' s work as published by the renown house of J. C. B. Mohr(Paul Siebeck) from Tuebingen in 1906 was Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinenSozialismus? The English translation is: lhy is there no Socialism in the United States?, first publishedby The Macmillan Press, London and by the International Arts and Sciences Press ofWhite Plains,

New York in 1976.5. The literature dealing with "American exceptionalism", or at least certain aspects of it, isvast. Here I will list only those works which I have found particularly important in my teachingand research over the years. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation ofAmerican Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York, 1955); Frederick Jackson Turner,The Frontier in American History (New York, 1947); John M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset(OOs.), Failure ofa Dream? Essays in the History ofAmerican Socialism (Garden City, 1974); SeymourMartin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, 1960); idem, The First New Nation (Garden City, 1967);idem, Agrarian Socialism (Garden City, 1968); idem, Revolution and Counterrevolution (GardenCity, 1970); the exchange between Sean Wilentz and Michael Hanagan in International !Abor andWorking Class History, Number 26; GwendolynMink, Old Lahor and New Immigrants in AmericanPolitical Development: Union, Party, and State 1875-1920 (Ithaca, 1986); and Jerome Karabel,"The Failure of American Socialism Reconsidered" in The Socialist Register (1979), 204-227.6. For the most thorough account of soccer in the United States see Zander Hollander (ed.),The American Encyclopedia of Soccer (New York, 1980).7. As to soccer's existence in the United States, the two following quotations seem rather revealing:"Although various attempts have been made, soccer has obstinately refused to take root in the UnitedStates. It has for many years been extensively played at a minor level, particularly in Philadelphia,where there has long been a proliferation of leagues, and in St. Louis, where it is very popularin schools," [John Arlott (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Spons and Games (London, 1975),381];and "Soccer is a sport you play, but you don't watch or follow, " [An I I-year old girl on Bostontelevision in the summer of 1986.] While soccer is obviously being played in the United States,the vast majority of the players are youngsters under the age of 19, 30% ofwhon1 are young women.Soccer in the United States is predominantly a game for middle class, suburban boys and girls whostop playing it once they reach their 20s, never having developed any interest in following the sporton a professional level, instead seeing it as a pleasant, "egalitarian" and "nonsexist" form ofrecreation.8. The United States is the only advanced industrial country which developed three major teamsports which, performed on the professional level, fill its "sport space" . Even here, however, dataamply demonstrate that it is somewhat erroneous to speak of the "Big Three" in terms of theirpopularity as television spectator sports since basketball has a substantially smaller audience thanfootball and baseball. Needless to say, many surveys do not even include soccer and those that doshow soccer consistently at or near the bottom of the American television viewers' preference asa spectator sport.9. It remains somewhat of a mystery to me why basketball became the only successful Americanexport hailing from the ' 'Big Three". Indeed, its success can be measured by the fact that, followingsoccer, it constitutes the world's second most popular team sport. The Federation Internationalede Basketball Amateur, founded in 1932, had 133 Inebers in 1982, with the Federation Internationalede Football Association (FIFA), established in 1904, numbering 147 member nations (13 nationsmore, incidentally, than were held together by the multisport International Olympic Committee IOC). See Janet Lever, Soccer Madness, pp. 27, 33-34. Three of basketball's essential characteristicscould perhaps account - at least in part - for this sport's successful internationalization in contrastto the American parochialism of football and baseball. First, just like soccer, basketball is blessedwith having very simple rules. This means that the game was easily transferable to the most diversecultures, since it was easily understood and appreciated. Second, basketball only requires five playerswhich has made it cheaper than baseball, necessitating little equipment, and a good deal less expensivethan football which requires much equipment. Last, unlike baseball, football and soccer, basketballwas explicitly designed as a winter, Le. indoor, sport. As such, it has never had any serious rivals,which could pose a major challenge to its proliferation following the massive build-up of indoorarenas during the post-World War II period in virtually every country of the First and Second Worlds.10. See: "A newspaper at the top of its games: Sovietski Sport works hard to keep its readersinformed on the NBA, NHL . . . " , in The Boston Globe, July 20, 1986.


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Praxis International 14711. Thus, for example, Antonin Dvorak's famous symphony in E minor, opus 95 known to musiclovers as "From the New World", wanted to capture and convey something "typically American",not Canadian or Australian, to its European audiences. The composer was fascinated by the UnitedStates as a multiethinic and multicultural society whose music he experienced as having originalelements which could only enrich that of the "old world". See Friedrich C. Heller, "Antonin Dvorak:

9. Symphonie 'Aus der neuenWelt'' ' in Playbill of the Salzburger Festspiele 1985 (July 29, 1985),n.p.12. For a fine comparative analysis of this issue, demonstrating a more ubiquitous and seriousreligious involvement on the part ofAmerican population when contrasted with inhabitants of otheradvanced capitalist societies, see WaIter Dean Burnham's superb essay: "The 1980 Earthquake:Realignment, Reaction, or What?" in Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers (eds.), The Hidden Election:Politics and Economics in the 1980 Presidential Campaign (New York, 1981), 98-140.13. The data about the United States being an "armed society" is nothing short of frightening.According to information obtained from Handgun Control Inc. in Washington, D.e., there were102 rnillion firearms in the United States in 1968, with the quantity increasing to 165 million by1978 and 240 million by 1985. Currently, one out of every four U. S. households has some sortof firearm, half of which are loaded.14. Leon Samson, Towards a United Front (New York, 1933).15. It is interesting to note that Great Britain and the United States dominated the five OlympicGames held before World War I (1896, 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912). Among the total of211 goldmedals awarded in this period (with one event having been voided out of a possible 212), the UnitedStates won 82 and Great Britain 36 bringing their total to 118 which amounted to 55.7% of all thegold medals obtained by winners in these five Olympics. If one adds the 4 gold medals won byAustralians, 3 by South Africans and 5 by Canadian athletes, the "Anglo-Saxon" total of 130 goldmedals yields 61.3%of all the gold medal.., awarded in these events. The Anglo-American dominancebecomes even more pronounced when it is contrasted to the 81 gold medal winners hailing fromother countries among whom none ac"hieved a position of clear superiority. This is yet another clearmanifestation of the fact that the invention, development and practice of organized sports were verymuch the domain of the most pronouncedly bourgeois societies at the turn of the century, i.e. theUnited States and Great Britain.16. Michael Oriard has superbly captured the essence of this "special relationship" between GreatBritain and the United States, highlighting the American side of the dilemma: "As former colonials,Americans looked to the mother country for leadership in athletic matters as surely as they imitatedBritish art, literature, and other cultural expressions in the nineteenth century. But it is equallyimportant to note our distinctive adaptations of English sporting customs. The historical momentof America's colonizing, the rejection of monarchy and aristocracy for an egalitarian ideal, andthe consequent differences in American social, political, and educational institutions had profoundimplications for the native sports culture." Michael Oriard, "In the Land of Merriwell: Fair Playand American Sports Culture," Chapter Two of the manuscript of a forthcoming book, p. 87.17. The word' 'soccer" is an abbreviation of Association Football. More precisely, it derivesfrom "association" forming a linguistic parallel to "rugger" which in turn became the vernacularfor Rugby Football. Brian Glanville, certainly among the foremost soccer experts in the world andone of the game's best chroniclers, tells this interesting anecdote in connection with the origins ofthe word "soccer": "Why soccer, though? (Emphasis in original.) The only plausible theory I haveever come across is that the credit, or blame, belonged to Charles Wreford-Brown, a famous centerhalf for Old Carthusians and the Corinthians. Sitting in his rooms in Oxford University, so it issaid, he was visited by a friend who asked him whether he were going to play 'Rugger' or Rugbyfootball. To this, in a burst of inspiration, Wreford-Brown replied, 'No: I'm playing soccer,' theworld being a corruption of 'Association' in the sport's correct name, Association Football." SeeBrian Glanville, A Book of Soccer (New York, 1979), 4, 5.18. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Soccer, 14.19. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Sports, 14.20. Calcio's only major legacy is the fact

2.1 - markovits, andrei s. - the other 'american exceptionalism' - why is there no soccer in the...

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