1In the light of all that has happened in the United States in the past three-quarters of a century, it is perhaps appropriate that the decade of the 1920s stands in popular imagination as «Roaring», a time of a halfcrazed loss of innocence, of a young giant of a country prancing on its stage, not so much America coming of age as showing off its growing pains for all the world to see. The sobre and sombre economic realities that brought the decade to a close affected the world at large and brought on values and attitudes that modified the gambling, religious, jingoistic nerve-centers of the first decades of the century, presenting new yet related sociological syndromes that have surfaced and re-surfaced in the years since. Gambling and its business counterparts, the stock market, found their most spectacular manifestations in the twenties, but surely live on in the lottery and alternating bull and bear markets that color modem American life. The fundamentalism of the Aimee Semple McPhersons and such phenomena as the Scopes trial find curious echoes in television evangelism and the cultism that are a way of life for many later-century Americans. The tragedy of Sacco and Vanzetti has had its counterparts in the Witch Hunts of the Fifties and the reverse discriminations of the generation since. If the following observations on sport as a phenomenon of the twenties seem colored by much of this, it is only an acknowledgement of these nerve-centers that are so apparent to observers and historians of the twenties, a nervous time (if seemingly a carefree one) in the development of what has been well titled «the American puzzle»: the overall history of the country.

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2Before we focus on sport itself, a brief digression into an aspect of another world, American crime, may be in order. On the face of it, crime and sport are antithetical, related only by the dimension of possible violence. Foul and fair play are two of the most overused clichés in American life. It will not be our purpose here to investigate these in any comprehensive sense, only to note that for better or worse American sport has over the years had its ups and downs in terms of public perception of sports potential to inspire or disillusion its audiences. Heroic deeds and figures have been more common than scandals, but both figure in the total picture. With this awareness, let us consider examples that perhaps best typify the twenties: baseball, football, and boxing.

3«The Golden Age of American Sport» has in baseball the most famous, legendary of names and reputations, that of George Herman Ruth, «The Babe», better known to most Americans than most of the presidents. Physically a most unlikely sports hero (he was built like a mobile beer-keg) but perhaps the most natively talented figure baseball has produced, Ruth emerged on the scene in the years of the first world war, as a pitcher and batter for the Boston Red Sox who soon found his way to the New York Yankees. His glory years in the twenties started out as the aftermath of American sports’ most celebrated crime-story, the «Black Sox» scandal of 1919, when it became known that several members of the Chicago White Sox had accepted money from gamblers to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. The players in question were banned from baseball for life by sports’ greatest judicial figure, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Landis’ twenty-plus years of rule over the game never saw a repeat of the Chicago gambling incident, but his patience would be sorely tested by Ruth, the image of the legendary riverboat gambler, full of boasting and fun, adoring of children (who responded in kind, recognizing one of their own in this massive, clumsy-graceful man), compulsively generous as well as shockingly vulgar, the ultimate in charisma. Ready to fart at elegant parties or to buy peanuts or drinks for everybody, he was once asked about his huge baseball salary, larger than the president of the United States, he roared out «Why not, I had a better year than he did»*. As well as such legendary feats as promising a sick youngster two home runs and delivering them the next game, or pointing to the center field bleachers and hitting the next pitch there against the Chicago Cubs in the 1932 World Series, Ruth’s exploits included eating thirty-five hot dogs on a bet, tyrannizing his manager and insulting Commissioner Landis (resulting in a heavy fine). Clearly a larger than life figure, Ruth more than anyone in sport epitomized the 1920s: a cross between Paul Bunyan and Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. His career of home run hitting, power baseball changed the course of the game forever. And like Gatsby, his career involved economic heroics as well. Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, still among the most majestic of sports palaces, was called «the house that Ruth built», the result of the enormous drawing power of the team’s star. Tailored to his left-handed skills, the stadium remains the greatest single institution in American sport of real estate developed around a single athlete. And if Gatsby succeeded mightily to impress his dream woman, Ruth (a considerable womanizer) with his 342 lifetime batting average (extraordinary for a power hitter) and 714 home runs (a figure never surpassed until less than twenty years ago) passionately pursued a dream of managing a major league team, a dream in which he was forever frustated. The fact that he would have made an impossible manager is perhaps significant; the larger than life man of the twenties, whether a Ruth, a Gatsby, or a Capone (a lover and supporter of grand opera), however successful as a performer was essentially non-managerial material. Gamblers all, they are a large part of American legend, and the gambling twenties fitted them like a spectacular glove.

II

4If baseball remains perhaps the most memorable of twenties sports (with Ruth’s explosive power as its apogee), football was not far behind. And here the focus shifts to the religious climate of the time. It has been widely noted that the American public has made a kind of religion of sport, perhaps best instanced by the typical husband passing his free time glued to sports television as a kind of revelation. Whole talk-show programs on modem American television have centered on this phenomenon; the exasperated wife and frustrated children taking back seats to this new religion (perhaps the roots of the «couch potato» syndrome). The television viewing public for major events like the World Series or the Superbowl is probably the largest and widest in the land, far exceeding any interest in other national or world events. An interesting study might be made of this as a latter-day equivalent of the Roman gladiatorial contests. Unlike the world audience for soccer/football, the TV audience is seldom violent, only mesmerized - surely a dimension of a kind of religious experience.

5In the twenties, long before television, in the time of Aimee Semple McPherson, and her Southern California tinsel-evangelical world as well as the tragi-comic Scopes Trial pitting rationalist Clarence Darrow against fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, an American academic center emerged as a rallying point for religious fervor in sport. Notre Dame University, a Roman Catholic school in Indiana, displaced Ivy League Yale and Harvard as a point a reference for football excellence and has remained so in the decades since. If the Dallas Cowboys stand today as America’s football team (professional), Notre Dame with its high academic standards and almost uniform football success, attracted audience support from Catholics and Protestants alike. For many years, the Notre Dame vs. Army game in New York City, was pretty much the college football game of every season, a beau-ideal of amateur sport at its best. The dream of every outstanding parochial school athlete in America, Notre Dame did not need to recruit; its appeal was magnetic and magical. The school owed its first prominence to three legendary sets of names: Knut Rockne, George Gipp, and the fabulous backfield known as the four horsemen. The Norway-bom Rockne was himself an outstanding athlete in the teens and went on to become the most successful coach in football history, winning 105 games and losing only 13 before his untimely death in 1930. Producing several national championships and a host of All-American players (many of whom went on to coaching success at major schools), Rockne was a father-figure for a generation of young American men, an ideal, inspirational public figure. His first great star was George Gipp, a brilliant, undisciplined Ruthian type, whose death at age 25, with a conversion to Catholicism, included perhaps the most famous words in American sports history. «Tell the boys to win one for the Gipper». (Interestingly, former president Ronald Reagan’s best remembered role was as Gipp in a film biography of Rockne.) Half a decade after Gipp, four talented young backs-Harry Stuhldreher, Jim Crowley, Elmer Layden, and Don Miller - were immortalized by the great sportswriter Grantland Rice as the «Four Horsemen», a nod in the direction of Scripture (the Apocalyptic vision) and Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 film success.

6The collective Notre Dame tradition, centering in the Catholic zeal of the school, has been a formative part of American sport; and in a mainly non-Catholic culture, it has exercised its own mystique. The other great football name for the twenties, linked to the commercialism as well as the image-glamour of the period, was Harold Grange, «the Galloping Ghost» of the University of Illinois whose exploits against Michigan in 1924 included touchdown runs of 95, 67, 56, and 44 yards in less than 12 minutes, undoubtedly the greatest single-game performance in football history. (Playing less than the full game, he gained 402 yards, with 5 touchdowns.) The first high-salaried name in professional football (Chicago Bears), for a short time he ranked with Ruth in audience appeal.

III

7Basketball, the other greatly popular American team sport, was in its infancy in the twenties (as was ice hockey), but another, individual sport must be mentioned. Boxing had known great names before the twenties (Jack Johnson, John L. Sullivan, Jim Corbett among others) but Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney were to figure in the sport’s financial coming of age, the «million dollar gate» syndrome that is now a fact of life: ringside spectators paying hundreds of dollars apiece to witness a contest that might last no more than a couple of minutes, the ultimate in entertainment-gambling. The world of «modem» boxing, featuring names like Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali, was born in the hype and excitement surrounding Dempsey and Tunney. As opposite as human types could be, Dempsey projected the genial roughneck image, and Tunney was all precision, with a large measure of culture (Tunney was later to be invited to places like Yale to lecture on Shakespeare.) It was the classic case of the puncher vs. the boxer. The two arrived at their confrontation(s) via victories over a foreigner who for a time was more popular than either with American audiences. Georges Carpentier, much lighter than either Dempsey or Tunney, was a decorated WW1 hero; and this fact loomed large with boxing’s fandom. Dempsey had avoided military service on a plea of family hardship, but a wartime photo showing him at work in a shipyard wearing fancy patent leather shoes sat ill with the public. The context here is noteworthy, in that jingoism was by no means confined to the sports public in the twenties. The execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti late in the twenties remains a controversial matter to this day because there is at least reasonable doubt that they were guilty of the payroll robbery and murder as charged, that their leftist politics rather than the facts of the crime doomed them. «The anarchist bastards», as some called them, were a focal point for the pseudo-patriotism that has surfaced and re-surfaced in twentieth century America. As recently as the 1960s, Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing championship for refusing military service on grounds of religious objections. In any case, Carpentier in losing to both Dempsey and Tunney remained for many years a sentimental favorite of the American people.

8After Tunney outboxed Dempsey and took away the championship in 1926, the two were rematched a year later, Tunney again winning on the famous «long count». (Dempsey floored Tunney in the seventh round but failed to retreat to his corner, allowing an extra four to six seconds of recovery time. Tunney held on to win on points.) Oddly, Dempsey, whom the public judged a draft-dodger, was to become a far more popular figure in retirement, for many years the owner and host of New York’s best-known sports restaurant. Tunney became a celebrity figure in the quiz-show and cultural-promotion worlds, and his son John was elected to the United States Senate from California in the 1970s.

IV

9These images, then, taken together offer a view of American sports in the 1920s. They suggest certain interesting perspectives on American life, a curious mixture of vitality and naivety along with a measure of restrictiveness. Sport in the twenties was largely the property of the east, the mid-west and the south; and it was overwhelmingly the property of White America. Blacks would not appear in major league baseball until after WW2, and their place in college and professional football was radically limited. (Today, most of the superstars in both sports are black.) The far west was heard from only in college football, mainly in Southern California where the University of Southern California was a power rivaling Notre Dame for many years. Colorful, disruptive talent (Babe Ruth), the beginnings of the sport-as-religion mystique (Notre Dame), and the million dollar draws (boxing) tell something of the times, as well as pointing towards the future. And one of the first great peddlars of auto-suggestion, Emil Coué, was almost as popular as any of these. One could make a good case for sports then and now as a powerful kind of identity-transfer: the average spectator as psychologically participating in the talent of a Ruth or a Michael Jordan. (Consider that the latter earns more than thirty million dollars a year in endorsements alone!) The twenties’ pursuit of imagined wealth through the phantasm of stock market «Margin», one of the greatest of self-delusions, surely relates to this syndrome. Sport in the twenties was an end as well as a beginning, a last hurrah for the real and often brutal work of American empire building, mostly completed in a physical sense by WW1. Builders had become spectators and, it can be argued that the twenties, apart from the spectacular individual and team talents it offered, amount to America’s first universal spectator theatre. «America’s Business is Business» noted Calvin Coolidge, the quintessential politician of the decade. And America’s so-called Golden Age reflects this along with the glory of individual talent and accomplishment.