INTRODUCTION
In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, the high-minded ideals of sportsmanship promoted by outdoors magazines such as Forest and Stream, Outing, and Recreation made a vital contribution to a larger cultural reimagining of American citizenship. These were years of far-reaching change for the republic. The western frontier vanished, new frontiers of imperialism opened in the Pacific and the Caribbean, and the old enterprise economy began to give way to corporate big business and consumerism.Footnote 1 A powerful nation was emerging, but for many Americans this was experienced as a time of crisis. An economic depression polarized wealth in the 1890s, for one thing, but there was a discernible cultural and political malaise too.Footnote 2 There were fears about new concentrations of interests: the corporate trusts, machine politics, labour and farming unions.Footnote 3 There were anxieties about the supposed enervating effects of consumerism and pen-pushing corporate careers.Footnote 4 Even as imperialist rhetoric acclaimed American stewardship over colonized peoples, there was a creeping national self-doubt. Some even questioned whether their fellow Americans were themselves fit, physically or morally, for self-government.Footnote 5 Yet sportsmanship could cut through all of this. Nostalgically evoking the cultural authority of the northeastern patrician elite – the families whose wealth and status pre-dated the Civil War – sportsmanship became, by the latter nineteenth century, a central preoccupation of magazines appealing to the growing number of middle-class consumers engaged in outdoors pursuits. These magazines offered aspiring outdoorsmen guidance on where to visit, what to buy, and how to conduct themselves; how to become, more properly, sportsmen. They conjured a world of recreation and adventure that encompassed the disparate regions of the United States and its imperial territories, and they exhorted their readers to adopt a wholesome respect for rules and fair play and to temper self-reliance with a sense of fellowship and social responsibility. In short, they imposed ethical meaning on middle-class leisure and explained its relation to the changing nation. And as this article shows, in so doing they shaped values that could be used to construct a new ideal of citizenship.
It is argued here, more specifically, that the growth of American interest in sportsmanship at the turn of the century shared a cultural impulse with the liberal nationalism that would shape the Progressive Era, and which found probably its best-known expression in the New Nationalism. These were the political ideas most closely associated with Theodore Roosevelt. It was, for example, in Roosevelt's energetic, reformist presidency (1901–9) that Herbert Croly discerned a way of repatterning liberalism around social priorities, and aligning individualism, the state, and corporate capitalism behind a vision of a democratic national community. In his landmark book The Promise of American Life (1909), he made the case for a national government that could restrain self-interest, and offered up a new democratic principle of “individual and social improvement” to replace the old individualism of the nineteenth century – which had produced undemocratic concentrations of wealth and power in the corporate trusts.Footnote 6 Roosevelt subsequently adopted a concept of New Nationalism that reflexively drew on those same principles, and which gave name and substance to his return to public life and his 1912 election campaign for the “Bull Moose” Progressive Party. However, the principles out of which the New Nationalism was fused were bigger than even his commanding persona. Historians have noted, for example, that although Woodrow Wilson took the White House in 1912 by rhetorically opposing Roosevelt's New Nationalism, its core principles ultimately guided his priorities in office (1913–20).Footnote 7 These were the ideas that in effect reinvented liberal thinking for the new century. Yet it is not commonly acknowledged that long before Croly wrote The Promise of American Life in 1909, outdoors magazines had been urging Americans to embrace a code of sportsmanship that lent itself to thinking about the ethics of individualism, fellowship, and social responsibility – and questions of national identity – and which had exerted a formative influence upon, among others, one Theodore Roosevelt.Footnote 8 If the New Nationalism acquired cogency during the Progressive Era, it was in no small part because its core values were by then already a familiar part of American cultural life.
The cultural and political importance of sportsmanship has nevertheless been overlooked in the major narrative histories of this period. For example, writing in the 1950s–1960s, Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, Martin J. Sklar, James Weinstein, Gabriel Kolko, and Robert H. Weibe dealt more strictly with matters of intellectual history and political economy.Footnote 9 Where Samuel P. Hays (1957) mentioned Roosevelt's sportsmanship, he did so only in passing – acknowledging it only as far as it related to his support for forest conservation.Footnote 10 And when scholars moved on to refocus on social and political history in the 1970s, and especially through the 1980s–1990s, in the work of David P. Thelen, John D. Buenker, Nell Irvin Painter, Alan Dawley, Steven J. Diner, and others, they bypassed the significance of elite sportsmanship even as they valuably foregrounded the experiences of the new middle class, workers, women, and immigrant and minority communities.Footnote 11 But the significance of sportsmanship has gone overlooked more recently too, by cultural historians of popular magazines, advertising, and mass consumption.Footnote 12 Even where T. J. Jackson Lears has come close, in discussing turn-of-the-century preoccupations with vitality and physical experience, he has not gone as far as to consider the relevance of the ideals of sportsmanship or their relation to the emergence of the New Nationalism. This is true of his more recent narrative history as well as his particularly influential No Place of Grace.Footnote 13
By the same token, historians of hunting have not really considered the broader political significance of outdoor recreation, but as in the work of John F. Reiger, Thomas L. Altherr (both in the 1970s), and to some extent Daniel Justin Herman (more recently), they have tended to follow Hays in looking at its bearing on the emergence of the progressive conservation agenda.Footnote 14 Where Herman has in other work linked hunting more explicitly to debates about egalitarian democracy and aristocratic elitism, he has not explored the intersection of that democratic discourse with the progressive New Nationalism.Footnote 15 Actually, far from acknowledging the contribution of outdoors sportsmanship to a modern, forward-looking, progressive tradition in America, many cultural historians, including Richard Slotkin, Gail Bederman, Kristin L. Hoganson, Sarah Watts, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and Christine Bold, have in recent decades linked it to the most atavistic, retrograde qualities of national life.Footnote 16 Often refracted through Theodore Roosevelt's fascination with African big-game hunting, his musings on race theory, his bloodthirsty histories, and his bombastic public support for imperialism, outdoors recreation has been placed at the ideological nexus of militarism and white male supremacism. It is not simply that this has created an imbalanced image of a President whose ambivalent legacy also includes conservation policy and Square Deal welfare liberalism, and who famously outraged the Jim Crow South by formally inviting Booker T. Washington (the leading voice of black America at the time) to dine at the White House. By more or less reducing outdoors recreation to blood sports and safaris, primitivism, patriarchy, and imperialism, historians have left little room for consideration of sportsmanship outside that essential ideological function. What is underplayed or absent in such interpretations is the strong thread of civic nationalism that ran through Roosevelt's thinking.Footnote 17 While historians have drawn connections between outdoors recreation and the construction of white manliness in this way, they have not typically acknowledged that when sportsmanship was invoked, it also spoke of a concern for civic culture and the national community.Footnote 18
In contrast, competitive games and athletics, as other aspects of sporting culture, have received closer consideration in these terms. Mark Dyerson, for example, has shown the importance of the Olympic movement in the promotion of democratic republican values. In a similar vein, S. W. Pope's work on competitive games has explained how sports brought diverse communities together in shared rituals.Footnote 19 Work remains to be done, however, to address the wider political significance of sportsmanship in middle-class leisure and recreation, and there is a need to widen the scope of enquiry out from a narrow focus on athletics and games. As outdoors magazines record, hunting, fishing, and a whole constellation of other outdoors interests were just as important as athletics and games in the construction of sportsmanship, and by extension American national culture. So were the various consumption practices that were increasingly an intrinsic part of outdoors recreation: the specialist clothing, equipment, and outfit; the specialist knowledge contained in books and magazines. For that matter, so was the pastime of reading about outdoors recreation. Outdoors magazines document how sportsmanship was held to apply to all of those pursuits, and how it operated as a moralistic exhortation for Americans to dedicate their consumption practices to the sort of individual and social improvement that was at the core of Herbert Croly's democracy.Footnote 20
In making this argument, it is important to recognize that while progressivism of this sort has been described in one corner (accurately) as a social order of imperialism and patriarchy, it was at the same time a foundation of twentieth-century liberal thought: it flowed into the tradition of reform liberalism that Richard Rorty traced from Herbert Croly through John Dewey and down to the 1960s, to the New Frontier and the Great Society; a tradition of what Michael Lind called liberal nationalism.Footnote 21 It was this political tradition that established a concept of common nationhood and an ideal of citizenship that provided the basis for subsequent struggles for democratic rights and social justice. Recognizing this is not to dispute the validity of critical readings of Progressive Era culture, but it is to acknowledge that a vital democratic tradition of reform paradoxically developed out of what was on one level an elitist, white, male, corporate capitalist, and imperialist vision of American civic culture. What the study of sportsmanship brings to an understanding of that history is a recognition that the principles of good republican citizenship were being worked out not only in intellectual and political debates at this time but also more broadly in a culture of consumption. And it shows the potential of the market, of consumption, to democratize that culture – in this case by incorporating a growing middle class.
To demonstrate this point, the work below examines the ideal of sportsmanship described in the outdoors magazines of the Progressive Era. It tracks the development of that ideal through the years in which it branched out from elite culture and became more properly part of the emerging national mass culture of the middle class. It looks across a range of publications before fixing upon Outing magazine during the years in which it was edited by Caspar Whitney (1900–8), a journalist, hunter, adventurer, idealistic champion of the American Olympic movement, and – no accident here – associate of Theodore Roosevelt. Once celebrated, even if now largely forgotten (it ceased publication in 1923), Outing offered arguably the richest subject matter of any outdoors magazine of the time, as is shown in the next section. Published monthly, it was a substantial hundred pages long, it was lavishly illustrated – notably by Frederic Remington and others – and its content ranged widely. But the significance of Outing lies not so much in the quality of its content, although this was excellent; nor its breadth, although it defined the field of outdoors recreation in a comprehensive way; nor its circulation, although for an outdoors magazine it sold well. Nor did it lie in Whitney's undoubtedly engaging personality – for editors of outdoors magazines were often charismatic and respected sportsmen of that sort: compare with George Bird Grinnell of Forest and Stream, or George O. Shields (“Coquina”) of Recreation, for example.Footnote 22 Rather its significance lies in the clarity with which Whitney expressed the potential for sportsmanship to serve as a model for American citizenship, and in the way he used his compelling editorial voice to frame outdoors recreation in these terms. He understood what was implicit in other outdoors magazines and saw in sportsmanship a set of cultural values around which a new nation could be shaped.
SPORTSMANSHIP AS NATIONAL CULTURE
At the end of the nineteenth century, outdoors magazines turned the sporting pastimes of the American elite into a national culture, incorporating a growing middle class of consumers, and encompassing the lands of the old frontier and the new imperial territories that were even then being assimilated into the tourist economy. Essentially, those magazines took a tradition of writing that dated back to before the Civil War, which promoted the benefits of outdoors recreation and offered guidance to aspiring sportsmen, and updated it for the coming century. As the commerce associated with outdoors recreation developed, so magazines responded by assimilating a greater variety of middle-class pursuits. Eventually, they reached far beyond the scope of the earlier generation of outdoors books, but they nonetheless continued in a similar vein by invoking the ideals of sportsmanship and seeking to impose a larger set of ethical obligations upon outdoors recreation. Sportsmanship thus became embedded in consumption practices and became part of a national culture rather than remaining restricted to a specific elite class. As a consequence, as will become apparent later, Caspar Whitney was able to represent sportsmanship as the embodiment of shared American values, which in his view constituted the ethical basis of Theodore Roosevelt's politics, the nascent New Nationalism.
Back in the 1840s, outdoors recreation – then largely restricted to hunting and fishing, camping and canoeing – had been the preserve of artists, writers, and gentleman sportsmen.Footnote 23 Around the time Francis Parkman was lighting out across the far West on the Oregon trail, for example, wealthy vacationers from the Northeast were rediscovering in the Adirondacks, upstate New York, a romanticized and sentimentalized landscape of mountains, forests, and lakes familiar from James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans.Footnote 24 When Joel T. Headley wrote The Adirondack in 1849, he could still describe an unspoilt retreat for determined gentlefolk drawn by the promise of a healthful, simple life and the forest's bounty of venison and trout.Footnote 25 However, things were changing, even by the time of the Civil War. In his second, 1864, edition, Headley observed that the Adirondacks had been transformed by an “influx of travellers” in the intervening years: “the white tents of their pleasant camps by the lake shore [now] tend to enliven very much the solitude of the wilderness,” he wrote.Footnote 26 The subsequent completion of a railroad route made the region even more readily accessible, and when William H. H. “Adirondack” Murray published Adventures in the Wilderness in 1869 it was said to have drawn a crush of tourists.Footnote 27
As the popularity of outdoors recreation grew, sportsmanship served as a mark of distinction.Footnote 28 “Adirondack” Murray's book was partly a guide to correct consumption practices – a didactic function that would continue in later generations of sporting magazines. As important as knowing where and when to go was knowing what to take. “Dry-goods clerks and students” over-pack, he wrote, and go “supplied with … any amount of useless impedimenta” and inappropriate outfit. He recalled, for instance, seeing one student vacationer laughably sporting a pair of dandyish alligator boots.Footnote 29 Yet, if the unschooled tourist was said to bring too much, the follower of Murray would still need to hit the stores before leaving town because he was quite specific about what one would need: everything from woollen undergarments to buckskin gloves, which fly-fishing rod, which flies (not French), which rifle (Ballard or Maynard).Footnote 30 The trick was to know the appropriate things to bring – knowledge that Murray offered to pass on to the earnest novice.
Nevertheless, sportsmanship implied more than discerning consumer choices. For those who considered themselves the true heirs of James Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye, the tourist who possessed the right outfit but lacked mastery was no true sportsman. That included mastery over the servant class. Learning how to choose the right guide was key, and Murray's book betrayed an imperious attitude: the “talkative guide” who “is always interrupting you” was to be avoided, he warned; still worse was the “ignorant, lazy, low-bred guide.”Footnote 31 It was important to be able to adopt a commanding bearing, the reader might conclude, perhaps as one might take to servants or employees. An ability to demonstrate mastery of technique and of the environment was equally important. Charles Hallock, founding editor of Forest and Stream, took a wry look at this “rush for the wilderness” in an 1870 article for Harper's. Documenting the exploits of the fictional Raquette Club, inspired by “Adirondack” Murray's book, Hallock showed how the cheery expectations of these tenderfoot sportsmen were confounded by rustic accommodation, cynical locals, blackfly, the difficulty of fly fishing, and the dustiness of outdoors cooking.Footnote 32 The message was clear: sportsmanship was about more than consumption, and the wilderness was best left to the class of sportsmen who knew what they were doing.
All the same, there was a growing market for publications that offered to inculcate the new middle class in the ways of sportsmanship. When George W. Sears (“Nessmuk”) wrote the enduringly popular Woodcraft – originally published by Forest and Stream in 1884 – he represented the outdoors as a place of social levelling. Of humble origin, Sears was adopted as a writer by the patrician elite and stood as a social mediator in that respect. He explicitly addressed himself in down-to-earth terms to what he called America's “Grand Army of ‘Outers’,” composed of the “hundreds of thousands of practical, useful men, many of them far from being rich; mechanics, artists, writers, merchants, clerks, business men” – all “workers, so to speak.”Footnote 33 Actually, given the expenditure and time away from work involved, it was more accurate to assume that the growing “army” of “outers” was one of middle-class means. Indeed, although he recommended keeping camp outfit to a minimum, the first stops to be made on a camping trip, Nessmuk style, were (as in “Adirondack” Murray's time), to be expensive ones to the outfitter.Footnote 34 Still, the importance of Nessmuk's writing at a time of growing consumerism was that it explained how to master outdoors skills. His writing in this way demanded an acceptance of the standards of the patrician elite, but he encouraged the democratization of that culture. Nessmuk offered to guide the aspiring new middle class into the patrician cultural world as much as into the wilderness.
By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, though, it was magazines that would play a key role in establishing sportsmanship as part of national culture. There had been magazines dealing with horse racing, boxing, or other sporting interests before the Civil War: The Spirit of the Times, for example. But the format of the outdoors magazine was the product of the 1870s, when a number of new publications came onto the market. Of those, Forest and Stream (New York, 1873; it incorporated Rod and Gun in 1877) emerged as preeminent, focussed on hunting and fishing and associated interests in the kennel, natural history, and canoeing and yachting.Footnote 35 The following decade saw the arrival, notably, of Outing (New York, 1882; it merged with The Wheelman, a Boston-based bicycle magazine (edited by Samuel S. McClure) in 1884 to become Outing and the Wheelman, before a change of ownership and a move to New York saw it revert simply to Outing in 1885). Then, in the 1890s, came a clutch of new titles: Recreation (New York, 1894), Field and Stream (Minnesota, 1896; it absorbed Forest and Stream in 1930); Outdoor Life (Colorado, 1898); and Outer's Book (Wisconsin, 1901; it later merged with Recreation before being taken over by Outdoor Life).Footnote 36 Readerships did not reach the stratospheric heights of Munsey's (500,000 by 1895) or Century (200,000 in the 1880s).Footnote 37 But according to Rowell's directory, they were comparable with the likes of The Outlook (between 40,000 and 90,000 in the 1890s), Country Life of America (20,000), and National Geographic (under 5,000 by 1900).Footnote 38 Forest and Stream, for example, had an estimated readership of between 5,000 and 10,000 around the turn of the century, and likewise Recreation. Field and Stream had a readership half that size, while Outdoor Life managed 20,000. Outing was one of the more successful: it hit a peak of nearly 90,000 in the 1890s, and again under Caspar Whitney's editorship, although the more typical estimate was around 20,000.Footnote 39
Like the earlier writings of Headley and Murray, outdoors magazines were basically preoccupied with the question of what constituted good sportsmanship. At the most elementary level, they associated it with skill and dedication in hunting, fishing, and athletics.Footnote 40 And it continued to imply discerning consumption practices: Forest and Stream, Recreation, and Outing all carried pages of advertisements for firearms and fishing tackle, binoculars and cameras, camping supplies, and clothing, as well as cruises and railroad journeys to destinations of the sort presumably appropriate for the authentic sportsman.Footnote 41 But for what were at core hunting and fishing magazines, sportsmanship was increasingly inseparable from questions about the larger social implications of outdoors recreation, especially regarding conservation ethics. In order to enjoy the freedom of the forest, it was necessary that sportsmen should be able to exercise self-control, behave responsibly, and respect the law. Accordingly, sportsmanship implied restraint and respect for the closed season, but also a moral disapproval of what was interpreted as the selfishness and greed of excessive slaughter that might threaten stocks. By the 1890s, this was understood as a wise or decent concern for society at large and for future generations. And by that measure, sportsmanship came to imply a selfless stewardship of the landscape and, increasingly, of national resources. As one correspondent with Recreation put it, the bad sport who breaks game-restriction laws is a bad citizen.Footnote 42 To put it another way, it was possible to conceive sportsmanship as, among other things, responsible citizenship.
Importantly, those magazines promoted the values of sportsmanship as part of a national culture. It helped in this respect that Forest and Stream was, through Grinnell, associated with the Boone and Crockett Club, and that Recreation was the magazine of the League of American Sportsmen.Footnote 43 But the growing national market for recreational goods was also key in this, for common consumption practices together with the shared understanding of sportsmanship worked against a narrow social elitism. When expressed as “gentlemanly” conduct, sportsmanship was still constructed in idealized class terms, but actually, outdoors magazines were clear that not every hunter of a supposed gentleman's social standing was a sportsman. By the same token, in theory sportsmanship could be claimed by anyone who lived up to its stringent principles of personal conduct.Footnote 44
It was around this national culture of hunting and fishing sportsmanship that assorted faddish pastimes and an increasingly diverse outdoors culture gravitated. By the 1890s, for example, Forest and Stream was incorporating articles on bicycling, travel writing, and poetry.Footnote 45 Recreation covered hunting and fishing and also bicycling, photography, and poetry.Footnote 46 Outing was particularly varied. From its earliest days, its sections included athletics, tennis, and archery, as well as hunting, fishing, and canoeing. The merger with The Wheelman brought in bicycling, and it expanded further during the 1880s–1890s, incorporating photography, poetry, golf, bowling, shooting, football, wrestling and boxing, rowing and yachting, swimming and other aquatic sports, equestrian sports, walking and climbing, and so on. It featured reports on expeditions and travel writing covering Europe and Asia, Mexico, the West, and the northlands of Canada. It published nature writing, natural history, and ornithology (and there was a crossover with hunting in articles that described the habitats of game animals).Footnote 47 And it published fiction too: hunting stories, animal stories, and tales of romance and adventure – both Jack London's White Fang and Clarence Mulford's Bar-20 stories appeared in Outing, for example.Footnote 48
This represented a vast field of middle-class leisure, brought under the auspices of sportsmanship. Not only did this mean that there were few significant areas of middle-class leisure that were untouched by sportsmanship; it also meant that sportsmanship would culturally seep into almost anywhere middle-class Americans had a stake. Consider, for example, that sportsmanship provided the lens through which Americans could look out upon lands that had recently been considered wild country but which were now being culturally reshaped by tourism: Washington, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, the Cascades, the Rockies, the Black Hills, and the Badlands, all of which were presented as aspirational destinations for sportsmen.Footnote 49 In turn, that romanticized western landscape was brought together with the well-trodden hunting grounds of the Adirondacks and the sentimentalized Southland. And at the same time, all of those American regions were placed alongside exoticized overseas territories, including recently annexed lands: Cuba (“a large immigration from the North is expected to come here with the snipe this winter,” one correspondent wrote to Forest and Stream in 1899), Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines (“When the war … is over, we shall hear much of those islands as a field for sportsmen,” in the view of one Recreation reader).Footnote 50 All of this was to be considered the dominion of sportsmanship.
By the turn of the century, then, there was already a well-established discourse about sportsmanship that served to channel ideas about consumption, personal moral conduct, and national identity. Outdoors magazines thus provide more than a record of American pastimes. The figure of the sportsman could be understood as the embodiment of an individualism that might impose moral leadership on the forces of the modern age. Instead of aimless power, sportsmanship offered ethical direction for a society being transformed by imperialism and corporate capitalism. Here was a cultural basis of what Croly would in a different context present as a restless democracy of individual and social improvement dedicated to the national purpose. As the twentieth century began, this tendency of sportsmanship was nowhere more evident or explicitly stated than in the pages of Outing during the years of Caspar Whitney's editorship, the focus of the next two sections.
SPORTSMANSHIP AS CITIZENSHIP
As the editor of Outing magazine, Caspar Whitney described his vision of an American citizenship, founded upon the ethical principles of sportsmanship, most explicitly in his monthly column, “The Sportsman's View-Point.” Outing was not quite as bully a pulpit as the presidency, but it was a bully one all the same, and Whitney offered up opinions on sporting and political matters – for sporting matters were to him inherently political, and political matters were to be judged by the idealized ethical standards of sportsmanship. It was sportsmanship, in his view, that would enable Americans to reconcile individualism with nationalism, self-reliance with social responsibility, and so reinvent democratic citizenship for the modern age of the twentieth century.
There were few Americans better placed to take the helm at a magazine like Outing at the turn of the century than Whitney. He had first made his name as a sports writer, but his career really took off in 1895 when he accepted an assignment at Harper's Magazine to journey to northern Canada – a real-life adventure that appeared first in the magazine, and then as a book the following year: On Snow-Shoes to the Barren Grounds.Footnote 51 In 1898, he travelled to Cuba as the magazine's war correspondent, documenting the exploits of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his volunteer Rough Riders, among other things.Footnote 52 The year after, he published a firsthand account of newly annexed Hawaii. By spring 1900, he was editor of Outing.Footnote 53 Still in his mid-thirties by then, Whitney was associated with the same Boone and Crockett Club hunting set that included Theodore Roosevelt (naturally), Owen Wister (author of The Virginian and sometime contributor to Outing), and George Bird Grinnell (the club's founder and editor of Forest and Stream).Footnote 54 These were urbane men who lived in genteel circumstances in and around New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island but who professed to be most at home in the forests of the Adirondack mountains or on the great plains of Wyoming. They were Republicans of the patrician sort, men of privilege who presumed that their own values were the true embodiment of the nation. However, that being said, Whitney did not have quite the same pedigree. His family (if not his name) was obscure.Footnote 55 He claimed to have attended Harvard, but in reality graduated from a college in California.Footnote 56 He was, to be precise, a middle-class man on the make. He was of the generation for whom the idea of the wilderness had been shaped by earlier writers – the likes of Headley, Murray, and Nessmuk. And it was as an outsider who had entered the margins of patrician society that Whitney absorbed the lessons of that previous generation and produced an idealized vision of the sportsman as national symbol, just as the United States was embarking on a new phase in its history.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States extended its hold over the Caribbean and the Pacific, and for Whitney's generation, sportsmanship took on an additional inflection in this ambitious age of imperialism. To the extent that imperialism was (self-servingly) rationalized as a national responsibility to prepare colonized peoples for democratic self-government, it hinged on the belief that white men, particularly those of Colonel Roosevelt's elite class, would naturally provide the necessary leadership for those peoples.Footnote 57 On the imperial stage, the sportsman could be deemed to demonstrate not merely the supposed strength and power of white masculinity but also the virtues of republican democratic self-government, organized according to the idealized principles of patrician sportsmanship. To Whitney's mind, sportsmanship encapsulated the best ideals of the patrician elite, and he hoped it would provide the organizing principle for a cross-class national community. In short, the sportsman was for Whitney a model of nationalist leadership. Thus, in Cuba, he wrote, Roosevelt (“dashing, energetic, determined”) had successfully fused the Rough Riders out of the raw material of assorted outdoorsmen and frontiersmen: “the man who hunted big-game, who was fond of out-of-door sport, the college athlete, the cow-puncher [cowboy], and the miner.”Footnote 58 As editor of Outing, Whitney turned the imperialist lens back upon the United States, which he believed was falling short of those ideals, and his conclusions would anticipate the emerging politics of progressive reform. He believed that the same ethical leadership that was supposedly to educate and mould colonized peoples into republican citizens was also needed at this time in the United States. And it was specifically through sportsmanship, Whitney believed, that Americans would construct a national community demonstrably fit for democratic self-government.
It was, above all, Theodore Roosevelt who, in Whitney's eyes, embodied those values of sportsmanship. Roosevelt was already a totemic figure by the turn of the century, of course, and in fact the object of some fascination for the likes of McClure's, Cosmopolitan, Century, and Scribner's.Footnote 59 To his admirers, Roosevelt embodied a patrician independence of mind that was equated with a detached concern for the national and public good. Here was someone, it was said, who was able to transcend party or faction or class. Charles Eugene Banks wrote of Roosevelt's days as a New York assemblyman that “he sat with bankers and bricklayers, with merchants and mechanics, with lawyers, farmers, day-laborers, saloon-keepers and prize-fighters.”Footnote 60 He was said to have had no special interest, was someone over whom the trusts had no hold, and who was therefore able to stand “for fair play,” as Jacob Riis wrote.Footnote 61 He was committed to the cause of good government, and in keeping with that he opposed the spoils system and the self-interested machine politics of the party bosses.Footnote 62 Yet, just as he strove to avoid “the despotism of the party machine,” he scorned self-indulgent individualism, which could only result in “windy anarchy.”Footnote 63 And it was that disciplined individualism that was thought to define Roosevelt's attitude to nationalism as much as party loyalty. His was conceived as a purposeful individualism in the service of a national community defined by rules and laws rather than competing interests. As Jacob Riis put it, TR stood “for an even chance to all who would use it for their own and their country's good.”Footnote 64
Whitney joined the growing chorus of Roosevelt supporters, but his Roosevelt was the figure of the sportsman, into which he packed those same qualities that others admired. Whitney's editorials accordingly framed TR's political qualities as aspects of sportsmanship. He praised his conservation agenda, for example, but it was as much what Roosevelt's approach said about his character as a sportsman that mattered: he was a man of “habitual directness and vigor,” in Whitney's words.Footnote 65 It was surely with Roosevelt in mind in June 1900 – as the Republican convention was choosing a new running mate for McKinley – that he looked forward to the day when the United States might “have a President who is more of a sportsman and less of a politician.”Footnote 66 Roosevelt was elected vice president that year, and then sooner than Whitney had imagined, and in the terrible circumstances of McKinley's assassination, he was thrust into the White House in September 1901. No matter how he got there, once in office, he did not disappoint Whitney. Here was a man who lived up to his own creed, and Whitney felt moved to place Roosevelt's words at the head of his August 1902 editorial as a keynote for that month: “The man who counts is the man who makes himself felt as a force for clean living, for civic righteousness.”Footnote 67 After Roosevelt secured a full term in the election of 1904, Whitney wrote approvingly of the victory. It was a vindication of his presidency, but above all of the man himself and the values he represented. By the same token, the election had somewhat vindicated Whitney's faith in the American people. Roosevelt had carried the support of a people who recognized a man who “is honest, and courageous, and virile; hates lying and meanness and sham,” Whitney opined.Footnote 68
Whitney was particularly starry eyed when it came to Theodore Roosevelt, but TR was, of course, to be distinguished from his other wealthy and patrician peers by his particularly earnest sportsmanship. In other words, it was not his class as such that made him a singular presence in American life for Whitney, but his commitment to the ethical code of sportsmanship. Or, to put it another way, the measure of the man was not intrinsically his social status, even if Whitney tended to assume that the patrician class would naturally provide leadership. Sportsmanship was, rather, a code of ethics. Crucially, its key features would become recognizable in the politics of progressivism – and especially in New Nationalism's focus on republican citizenship. For example, the values of sportsmanship could be deemed by Whitney to be standards appropriate to City Hall or the chamber of commerce as much as to the sports field. Respect for rules could be equated with respect for the rule of law over self-interest, respect for one's opponent with social responsibility, a concern for conservation with the prudent management of national resources.
Thus Whitney blamed the absence of a sporting sentiment that should have placed ethics above winning for low standards in public life. It was, he wrote, “the pursuit of that modern grail, ‘success’,” at all costs that was to blame: the determination to “Win – win somehow, but win; get the purse; everything goes so long as you are not caught with the ‘goods on’ – to borrow Tammany's apt slang.” There was a connection between an absence of sportsmanship, he wrote, and a litany of public and private ills: “scandals in business, adulteration of food, corruption in politics, disloyalty among friends, [and] social blackmailing.” It was clear to Whitney that “whether your activities be at Caracas in the Venezuelan diplomatic service, or at Albany in the Supreme Court, or at Atlantic City playing ‘summer-nine’ baseball,” the root cause of dishonesty was the same: “Write greed and graft and cant on the front door of modern endeavour, and then do not ask me why a man's play reflects the spirit of man's business and social struggles.”Footnote 69 He was clear about what was unsporting: a means-justify-the-ends competitiveness; a corporate, business decision-making process driven by profit regardless of social responsibility; machine politics. Accordingly, we might infer what constituted sporting conduct: socially responsible business, a politics shorn of patronage and interests.
Here, Whitney's notion of a sporting society began to resemble elements of Theodore Roosevelt's emerging progressivism, and ultimately the New Nationalism: good government and a demand for corporate responsibility, which flowed into the Square Deal and business regulation. However, his vision was more strictly ethical rather than political. Whitney was more concerned with promoting a spirit of sportsmanship that might provide the basis of a national community than with the business of government itself. He believed that patriotism should be personally invigorating and bring Americans together – a patriotism of the “full-blooded, generous-hearted, kindly speaking, manly, womanly sort,” which stood for “charity (of action and speech), fresh air, cold water, sincerity, courage and sanity.” Outing’s success, he wrote, was attributable precisely to the way in which its sportsmanship gave substance to national identity through its “direct appeal to its readers to be wholesome, to be helpful, to be genuine, to be American.” Those qualities of sincerity, selflessness, and determination would be needed, he suggested, in order to confront the task of reforming a nation sullied by “unclean politics, and the municipal and corporate corruption.” While “foul spots” were inevitable in any society, he wrote, Outing’s sportsmanship represented a countervailing tendency that was truer, he wrote, to “the real heart of America.”Footnote 70 The heart of America in this sense, then, was a nationalism predicated on the ethics of sportsmanship. What turned Whitney's individualism into something more consistent with the emerging politics of the New Nationalism was precisely the way in which sportsmanship combined it with an ethical commitment to social responsibility and the fellowship of national community in this way.
Herbert Croly would make the case more emphatically for government to undertake the work of reform, but he also saw the individual citizen as the cornerstone of a strong national community. The Promise of American Life was not a book about sports and recreation, of course, but when Croly praised Theodore Roosevelt as a source of inspiration, he was in effect lauding many of the personal qualities that Caspar Whitney had been describing in idealized terms as sportsmanship over the course of a decade as editor of Outing magazine. For Croly, the unifying principle of Roosevelt's career was “the national idea,” and it was this that gave “a democratic meaning and purpose to the Hamiltonian tradition” of national political action.Footnote 71 By democratic, Croly had in mind not the “democracy of suspicious discontent, of selfish claims, of factious agitation, and of individual class aggression,” which was to say the “democracy of individual rights.”Footnote 72 Rather, it imparted a responsibility. It required a commitment to “laborious, single-minded, clear-sighted, and fearless work” towards a national purpose.Footnote 73 Croly argued that it was in the national purpose that individualism would find its truest expression, through the development of “individual purpose and power.” And so, for Croly, “patriotism, instead of being something apart from [individual] special work, should be absolutely identified therewith.” As a consequence, the American patriot “is to make his contribution to individual improvement primarily by making himself more of an individual”; in short he “needs to do what he has been doing, only more so, and with the conviction that thereby he is becoming not less but more of an American.”Footnote 74 In an important respect, this was what Whitney looked to sportsmanship to do, to serve the function of establishing a shared ethical purpose aligned with the national community. The next section develops this theme.
SPORTSMANSHIP AS DEMOCRATIC NATIONALISM
In Outing, Caspar Whitney brought hunting sportsmanship together with elite athletics and competitive sports to define a vision of democratic nationalism. In doing so, he described a national community shaped in the image not of the actual patrician elite but of his idealized notion of that class: citizens whose sporting conduct was taken as a measure of their moral conduct in business and society, and whose sportsmanship was matched by wholesomeness and civic responsibility. He demanded the most scrupulous observation of game laws and the highest standards of amateurism: sports for sport's sake and the Corinthian spirit. And given his concern for amateurism, and his interest in college sports and the leisure pursuits of gentleman sportsmen, it would be reasonable to conclude that he assumed that the nation's sporting elite would be drawn exclusively from the social elite – the same patrician class that was supposed, according to such a calculus, to set a moral example and embody the national character in public life as in sports.Footnote 75 But things were more complicated than that. Having constructed an idealized patrician sportsman in the figure of Theodore Roosevelt, Caspar Whitney's editorials were preoccupied with the failure of the patrician class to perform the function of moral leadership in reality. In matters of sporting ethics, his editorials consequently took on the jeremiad quality recognizable in a strain of progressive writing: there is something rotten out there, and it falls to citizens of good will to redeem the republic. It was an engaged citizenry in this mould, inspired by hand-me-down patrician sportsmanship, striving like Croly towards a shared ethical purpose, which constituted the heart of Whitney's ideal national community.
Sportsmanship had traditionally emphasized the importance of individual moral responsibility. Writers of an earlier generation had constructed sportsmanship as a code of personal ethics in outdoors recreation, and then in the latter nineteenth century, books and magazines cast middle-class leisure in like terms. Whitney took this a further step onward by presenting sportsmanship as the basis of republican values for the nation at large, but he retained that earlier emphasis upon personal ethics. Of course, one answer to the problems of bad sportsmanship (or bad business practice, or political corruption, for that matter) could have been to use the power of national government to regulate the commerce of sports and to use the law in effect to enforce sportsmanship. And Whitney did advocate state and federal game and fish protection, wishing to see this extended to the length of the season, the sale of game, and the licensing of firearms.Footnote 76 He went as far as to suggest that game wardens should be given the powers of US marshals under such a new regime, and be permitted to open suspect packages where violations of the law were suspected.Footnote 77 He urged reform of the penal code to bring criminal sanctions to bear on those who failed to behave responsibly, which would include those who needlessly slaughtered animals or killed rare species.Footnote 78 Partly, he had in his sights wealthy Long Islanders who failed to respect the closed season.Footnote 79 But the point Whitney was making in his editorials was more essentially didactic. He was largely concerned with establishing a basis for national action, and with promoting individual responsibility within that national context.
Much of Whitney's editorial writing can be understood in this light as an attempt to stimulate national leadership by promoting cooperation and competition between disparate athletic and sporting clubs and societies. He urged associations of hunting sportsmen to band together in order to lobby government.Footnote 80 And he wrote often of the need for amateur clubs to be established or strengthened, and for their rules and regulations to be harmonized. Editorial comments on this subject covered a broad range of sports, from athletics to baseball, tennis to polo, horse racing and driving, cycling and rowing and canoeing, golf, rifle shooting.Footnote 81 “We need very badly an annual congress of sportsmen in sections where uniformity is feasible,” he wrote in 1900.Footnote 82 On an elementary level, he encouraged national-level thinking about sporting endeavours of all sorts. National competitions were in that context important mechanisms for encouraging the development of a national consciousness among the middle class. He concerned himself here in particular with college athletics, but also tennis and golf. And, of course, international competitions provided opportunities to define specific American qualities. The America's Cup was key, and Whitney devoted many pages to discussing the ingenuity and superiority of US yacht design.Footnote 83 Then there were the Olympic Games. Whitney was a member of the American Olympic Committee during the 1900s, and saw the games as a test not simply of individual athletic prowess but of national character.Footnote 84
While Whitney encouraged national and international competition of this sort, and along with that the harmonization of standards and regulations in sport, he insisted that the spirit of sportsmanship should be sufficient itself to maintain fair play. “Already there are too many systems,” he wrote in 1905. “What we want is the building of the right spirit.”Footnote 85 That spirit should, he insisted, flow from amateurism. Yet professionalism seemed to be inexorably on the rise: there was money to be made from sports. The past season had been “a reproach to American yachting,” he wrote in October 1900, for example. Two seventy-footers, the Mineola and the Rainbow, had been captained and crewed by professionals – worse still, Englishmen: “There is, perhaps, no professional in the world filled with so many dirty tricks as the English,” he wrote; they “resorted to tactics in racing which” – note his class snobbery here – ”smack of the pit and the ale-house of East End London.”Footnote 86 In polo, he wrote the same month, there was a discernible “lack of sportsmanship,” and “too many mug-hunters” (those who compete for prizes, i.e. trophy cups or “mugs”). Other sports suffered the same problem. Mug-hunters “infest sports,” he wrote – although this time he had in mind people of means who “are long in pocket,” but invariably “short on amateur spirit.”Footnote 87 And in horse racing, gambling was eating away at sportsmanship. “The sportsman has been gradually giving ground to the dollar-seeking sporting man,” and of course, he wrote, “betting is to be found incentive for all the dishonest running and riding, of which, alas! we have seen too much within the year [of 1900].” Urgent action was needed if American stables were to avoid becoming as crooked as the English.Footnote 88
The bigger problem, though, was that the universities that were supposed to be the engines of American amateur sportsmanship – particularly Harvard and Yale – consistently failed to live up to Whitney's expectations.Footnote 89 His editorials returned again and again to the vexed question of college sporting ethics. There was a growing concern at the turn of the century that commercial incentives were turning amateur college athletes into, in effect, professionals or semiprofessionals. There was enough of an air of scandal about it for McClure's to publish a two-part investigative article in 1905 by Henry Beach Needham (another of the Teddy Roosevelt crowd), which cited Whitney and substantially shared his view on the matter. “The hope of college amateurism is in the awakening of the spirit of true sport – fair play, and sport for sport's sake,” he wrote.Footnote 90 Whitney in turn enthusiastically endorsed the piece.Footnote 91
Whitney often made the point himself, that a lack of sporting spirit was giving rise to the “corrupting influence” of professionalism and “unwholesome methods.”Footnote 92 There was a “win-at-all-costs” mentality, constantly creeping in, he complained.Footnote 93 This mentality encouraged colleges to bring professionals into the amateur game, or to make devious “semi-professional” arrangements, which only caused “confusion” and “corruption.” His concern: “it will never be possible to keep any game wholesome and prosperous unless competition for money is the fundamental line separating the amateur from the professional.”Footnote 94 Cynicism followed the erosion of amateurism, giving rise to “muckerish tendencies” (foul play), and the practices of “hoodlum coaching.”Footnote 95 He was to repeat the same lament about the “abominable modern spirit to beat the rules” throughout his time at Outing.Footnote 96
Nor could sportsmanship alone stop commercial interests from profiting from unsustainable and closed-season hunting. Simply, some hunters measured the success of their day's shooting by the number of birds bagged, while for others, hunting was an instrumental means of obtaining for food or profit, and manufacturers brought new technologies to market all the time to meet such demands. In the summer of 1900, Whitney bemoaned the introduction of a new “sure catch fish-hook and animal trap.” It was a “devilish device,” he wrote.Footnote 97 Later in the year, he denounced the arrival onto the market of a new pump-action gun.Footnote 98 A few years later, the new “automatic shotgun” provoked the same response.Footnote 99 And whereas Whitney's idealized figure of Theodore Roosevelt perfectly embodied the qualities of sportsmanship, actual sportsmen inevitably fell short of the mark. Even one as well-known as former President Grover Cleveland found himself temporarily in disgrace when it was reported that he had shot seventy-five ducks in one day during the closed season, in April 1901. Butchery of this sort “is not the work of a sportsman in any season,” Whitney wrote, and “at this time of the year it is the work of a pot hunter” (i.e. one who hunts for food rather than sport; it was about the lowest insult one sportsman could hurl at another).Footnote 100
There was a utopian quality to this vision, and so long as Whitney demanded impossibly high ideals he would find himself engaged constantly in a struggle to stimulate an ongoing striving for moral improvement – and through that to form the basis of a common national commitment to the values of sportsmanship. His exhortation functioned in this cyclical way. Thus, in autumn 1901, Whitney wrote there had been “great improvement recently in the ethics of college sport” on the back of the “campaign for clean sport,” before bemoaning an outright “crisis in university athletics” caused by an eligibility controversy at Yale just two months later.Footnote 101 In 1905 he declared that the situation was greatly improved since the 1890s, but at the same time warned of the growing threat of commercialism, professionalism, and an imperative to “Win, no matter how, but win”; only two months later he was decrying the “hypocrisy” of “covert professionalism” afflicting amateur college sports, even while professing to believe in the face of such evidence that “the spirit of sport is growing” amid “the escaping noxious gases from the sewer poison” of corruption.Footnote 102 Similarly, the spirit of sportsmanship among hunters was, Whitney insisted, growing and yet continued effort was needed. His view was that “the growth in sportsmanly conduct” had been “very great” over the past decade or so. The spring hunter “was formerly the rule, now he is the exception.”Footnote 103 Yet the work of changing habits was an ongoing task: “it is the duty of every man who has a humane and economic instinct to not only himself stop spring shooting,” he wrote in 1900, “but to urge similar action by such of his friends as also offend”; he was expressing much the same view four years later.Footnote 104
It mattered in this respect that sportsmanship was not a simple struggle for improved performance – and actually, Whitney's rhetoric scorned the notion that winning was the purpose of sports, or that the number of animals bagged was the measure of the hunter. Rather, what was behind all of this was striving for individual moral improvement and for an understanding that the development of one's moral character was also the development of the national character. The ceaseless striving towards sportsmanship that Whitney endlessly advocated was above all a way of signalling a commitment to the national community. This was the essence of Roosevelt-thinking: in the making of the American nation, “Nothing can take the place of the individual factor,” as TR told a crowd at the Minnesota State Fair in a speech on “National Duties” on 2 September 1901. It was as a nation of individuals that we “gird up our loins … with the stern purpose to play our part manfully in winning the ultimate triumph.”Footnote 105 And, of course, this sort of thinking was what Croly so much admired, and which would constitute the core of the New Nationalism.
To be a good sportsman in Whitney's terms was to assume a burden of personal responsibility, and to seek to live up to high ideals. Whitney constructed an idealized figure of the patrician sportsman, against which he judged all sporting endeavours. And here was the essential contradiction in his thinking, which he did not rhetorically resolve, and which he did not bring himself to state explicitly, but which was the logical implication of his writing. Whitney implied that the patrician elite were the true custodians of the values of sportsmanship, and hence American values. But he also insisted that sportsmanship was a matter of individual integrity and commitment to the national community. The tenor of his editorial writing was that it could not be considered a quality necessarily inherent in any class. Equally, his editorial writing put an inflection on the various assorted leisure pursuits covered by Outing. All were by implication subject to his exacting standards: the often solitary pastime of angling could be considered in these terms a contribution to the national community; the notably nonathletic activity of automobile driving could be seen as a mode of sportsmanship; the distinctly indoors habit of reading was essential to the larger culture of outdoors recreation, as sportsmanship was about the ethics of doing as much as it was about the doing itself. And here was the democratic potential in Whitney's writing: if the patrician elite could not live up to the idealized standards that Whitney had ascribed to them, then Outing left open the possibility that any of its readers could embody those values in any number of pursuits. It was a matter of striving towards sportsmanship.
CONCLUSION
This article has looked in particular at Caspar Whitney's role as editor of Outing in order to understand the larger cultural and political significance of sportsmanship at the turn of the twentieth century. Even if it was not strictly typical, Outing can be regarded as representative or emblematic of American outdoors magazines. It encompassed the field of outdoors recreation more comprehensively than its rivals, for example, and in doing so it laid bare the full extent of that field. And while other magazines also promoted sportsmanship, it was under the editorship of Caspar Whitney that Outing made its political implications explicit. This is the value of Outing, then: it brought the larger significance of sportsmanship into sharp focus. Ultimately, as a specialist magazine, there was a limit to Outing’s reach. General magazines reached more people and perhaps, given their circulations, a more diverse middle-class readership. But Whitney demonstrated the potential for sportsmanship to channel debates about the changing republic. In doing so, Whitney's editorial writings also underline the political significance of the growth of consumption at the turn of the century. Outdoors recreation was, if nothing else, a set of consumption practices, and the ethics of sportsmanship shaped notions of progressive citizenship and consumerism at the same time here.
As has been shown, Whitney aligned the principles of sportsmanship with the emerging national profile of Theodore Roosevelt. In contrast to the Republican Party boss Mark Hanna, who famously derided Roosevelt as “that damned cowboy,” Whitney's Roosevelt was no frontier roughneck.Footnote 106 He saw him, rather, as a Boone-and-Crockett gentleman sportsman who had turned his energies to the service of the nation, demonstrated in his political career and on the new imperial frontier of Cuba. It was sportsmanship, in Whitney's view, that had enabled Roosevelt to fuse a cross-class community of patriotic Rough Riders out of assorted outdoorsmen, athletes, and frontiersmen. And sportsmanship was the basis of his ethical leadership in political service too, marked by his example of individualism twinned with a commitment to a public good, to social priorities, and to a wholesome, disinterested respect for rules and the law. In these endeavours, Whitney believed, Roosevelt embodied a sportsmanship that was also the right spirit of nationalism. Or to put it another way, it was sportsmanship that turned Roosevelt's nationalism into a morally purposeful use of power.
What this shows is that it was possible to construe sportsmanship as an ethical framework for a citizenship that could assimilate the new forces transforming the republic, which were creating in the process a national consumer economy and establishing the United States as a great power in a global system of imperialism and corporate capitalism. It made for a nationalism essentially democratic in spirit, one in which individual citizens, rather than the state, rather than corporations, would represent the national community. And crucially, it identified the nation as the level at which political organization should take place. It should be unsurprising that this would find itself in tune with important elements of Herbert Croly's thinking, for he was also inspired by the example of Theodore Roosevelt, the sportsman's sportsman. The point, however, is not so much whether Caspar Whitney beat Croly to the punch in comprehending the meaning of Roosevelt's presidency. Rather, both in different ways gave voice to emergent ideas at this time, at a point in history when Americans were reaching towards a way of reinventing republican citizenship. Similarly, the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt should be thought of as just one expression of those sentiments, which flowed into a larger progressive tradition. By tuning in to the place of sportsmanship in history, then, it is possible to gain an insight into the extent to which the values that informed the progressive politics of the New Nationalism were rooted in American cultural life.
