Introduction
The budget for a year of one of those athletic missionaries—one of these men who does his utmost to pass on to the country in which he works America’s best in athletics, is about $5,000, covering travel, salary, and other expenses. It is carried in each case in America by individuals or groups of individuals such as Rotary Clubs, business men’s organizations, and the like—by men who cannot go themselves, but who express themselves and their American ideals in exercise and sport through the foreign physical [education] directors of the Y.M.C.A.Footnote 1
This statement from 1921 is one of the more obvious attempts by officials of the North American branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) to encourage philanthropists to donate money to its foreign sports work. Its author, Elwood S. Brown, was the secretary of physical education of the combined foreign department of the United States YMCA and the much smaller Canadian YMCA, and hence responsible for the sports programs abroad. Spreading Western amateur sport in non-Western world regions was part of the YMCA’s large-scale social engineering program and one of the manifold activities undertaken by Protestant-Evangelical missionaries since the 1880s, which contributed to the emergence of what Ian Tyrrell called the United States’ transnational “moral empire.”Footnote 2 Reaching millions of people, however, cost millions of dollars. Sending U.S. and some Canadian YMCA officials abroad therefore depended primarily on support from American civil society: common YMCA members, wealthy businessmen, and their families, clubs, and foundations. These potential donors needed to be convinced of the necessity and achievability of the YMCA’s sports program and the corresponding “civilizing mission”, which was aimed at social transformation towards democracy and capitalism, improving public health, and encouraging Christian internationalist attitudes. Otherwise, donors would perceive that they would be better off contributing to other institutions and causes.
Fulfilling the expectations of possible donors was of central importance for encouraging them to contribute money: however, during the first decades of the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), convincing wealthy businessmen to donate became more difficult. This nucleus of a newly emerging class of philanthropists expected social welfare organizations not to inefficientlyFootnote 3 spend money on lessening the symptoms of social dysfunction such as poverty, violence, and inadequate healthcare, but to tackle its causes. The use of scientific methods to identify the roots of social dysfunction and to find rational and economic solutions to increase social and physical well-being gained in importance, which encouraged social welfare organizations to operate according to capitalist norms and values.Footnote 4
In the following, I argue that donors’ growing expectations regarding more efficient and scientific social work had a massive impact on how the YMCA presented to an American audience its global sportive “civilizing mission” during the 1910s–20s. The YMCA stood in contrast to many other missionary organizations, whose activities in Asia—the continent where the most non-Christians lived—and other regions were considered to be quite inefficient.Footnote 5 Already in 1901, John R. Mott had become chief executive of the YMCA’s foreign department and devised an approach to circumvent the problems other missionary organizations faced. The YMCA’s focus on the social gospel, which included spreading amateur sport, made it possible to report more obvious successes, reached in a shorter period of time, which facilitated convincing donors to provide money. Simultaneously, improving the living conditions of locals and influencing students—the future ruling elites of these countries—could attract them to Protestant Christianity. This approach facilitated the YMCA’s foreign work, but also must have appeared to donors as an efficient and effective strategy. While this article in no way denies the YMCA’s Protestant-Evangelical intentions, public relations stand in the foreground.
The need to appeal to capitalist and scientific reasoning resulted in almost standardized promotional topoi and in some exaggeration: to influence donors, it was important to communicate that the YMCA’s physical directors supported scientific approaches to public health and encouraged, through amateur sport, a social transformation towards democracy and capitalism as an attempt to tackle the roots of social violence and poverty. YMCA reportage thus, for instance, supported rhetoric of “exceptional” American colonialism in the Philippines.Footnote 6 As a consequence, the YMCA first presented clear-cut success stories in spreading sports in East Asia during the 1910s. After the end of the First World War, the experience gained in East Asia and the seemingly successful assimilation of Asian athletes into Protestant American civilization was communicated as a guarantee that the YMCA would be able to realize the same aim in other non-Western regions. The global circulation of its experience would prevent a waste of donations through failures.
I also argue that the YMCA tailored the presentation of its foreign sports program to four different historical periods during the 1910s and 1920s: early American colonialism in the Philippines; the First World War; the aftermath of the war; and the late 1920s. Afterwards, the Great Depression significantly reduced philanthropic donations and severely hampered the activities of Protestant American progressive forces.Footnote 7 However, by the late 1920s, the YMCA had already completely “de-Orientalized” its earlier reporting on East Asian social deficits to underline its own efficiency and competence in transforming societies. This article thus addresses the following questions: How did authors present the YMCA’s sportive “civilizing mission” to potential donors, and how did they attempt to increase public attention? How did YMCA reporting and the emergence of certain topoi correspond to the more general changes in American philanthropy, such as a growing interest in scientific standards and efficiency? Why did images of Asian and other non-Western athletes change over the course of the sportive “civilizing mission” and how were they related to its globalization during the 1920s?
The globalization of the YMCA’s sportive “civilizing mission” during the 1910s and 1920s indeed affected millions of people.Footnote 8 Recent scholarship has shown the importance of its activities in East Asia (here including Northeast and Southeast Asia) during the 1910s and 1920s and the central role of Elwood Brown. The U.S.-colonized Philippines turned into a “laboratory of modernity”, since collaboration between the colonial administration and the YMCA resulted in a sports program for the new public school system and facilitated the institutionalization of local and national championships. On the regional level, the Far Eastern Championship Games, founded by the YMCA and held ten times between 1913 and 1934, contributed to the integration of East Asia (the Philippines, Japan, and China) on the basis of the shared norms and values of amateur sport. These regional games became the model for the YMCA’s Inter-Allied Games (1919) and for further regional games later established in Latin America, India, West Asia, and the Balkans in cooperation with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).Footnote 9 The impact on the United States of the globalization of the YMCA’s foreign sports program, in contrast, remains understudied.Footnote 10
The topic further gains in importance, because the YMCA’s public relations program and the role of donors also have not yet attracted much attention.Footnote 11 This is despite a growing interest in large foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, whose creation in the early twentieth century revolutionized philanthropy in the United States and abroad.Footnote 12 For example, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a friend of John Mott, donated at least $14 million to the YMCA, meaning that more detailed studies on extremely wealthy donors are desirable.Footnote 13 This study, however, provides a transnational analysis of the connection between the YMCA’s global sports program and its domestic public relations program while focusing on the more general trends in philanthropy and how the YMCA addressed a very large number of individual donors, whose contributions were important but whose names are no longer known.Footnote 14
The analysis is based on a systematic evaluation of articles related to the YMCA’s foreign sports program that were published in Association Men, Physical Training, Foreign Mail, The Outlook, and The World’s Work.Footnote 15 These YMCA and Christian progressive journals and weekly news magazines served a variety of purposes such as information, entertainment, and academic exchange, which will be addressed below. However, all of them were read by an “imagined community” of supporters of Christian Progressivism and therefore by potential donors wishing to see elements of Protestant American civilization spread globally.Footnote 16 It should be noted that print media still were the most important form of mass communication during the 1910s and 1920s, and that the YMCA used and distributed its publications in connection with fundraising campaigns and when approaching individual philanthropists. YMCA lantern-slide presentations, too, were used for fundraising campaigns during the 1920s; this study also draws on an analysis of these. Since it was found that articles published during each of the four time periods I identified above were very similar to each other, one example from each period will be analysed in detail and connected to similar reports on the foreign sports program.
Modern sport here will be characterized by equality, bureaucratization, specialization, rationalization, quantification, and obsession with records.Footnote 17 During the Progressive Era, increasing urbanization and industrialization caused a shift away from outdoor, physical farm labour to office work. The process resulted in fears of deteriorating public health due to stress-caused problems such as neurasthenia (physical and mental exhaustion) and due to a “degeneration” of the white American Protestant body. Catholic immigration and resulting labour struggles intensified such fears. As a consequence of this perceived danger, professional physical educators and physicians contributed to the development of science-based physical exercise and its application to improve public health. A noteworthy number of them were trained or employed by the YMCA at the International YMCA College in Springfield, Massachusetts, where volleyball, basketball, and various physical exercises were developed. Character building was another important aim, because it served to integrate all Americans, including minorities and immigrants, into Protestant American society, but later also spread to the “moral empire” abroad. Sports were a means of shaping bodies and minds disciplined enough to resist the “temptations,” such as alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and promiscuity, that urbanization and anonymity made more accessible. Moreover, the YMCA and other institutions encouraged norms and values such as fair play (“good governance”), competition-based belief in personal effort as the way to success (instead of believing in luck or fate, as in the case of many forms of gambling), individual equality and practical efficiency (by choosing athletes for the team based on their competence and not on their skin colour or social background), team spirit (cooperation for a common goal), obedience of duly constituted authority (“duty and civic virtue”), and especially self-control (“state monopoly on violence”) to decrease inter-human violence. A muscular Christian understanding of civilization thus was rooted in a Protestant interpretation of democracy, Christian internationalism, and a capitalist economic order.Footnote 18 Following the YMCA’s earlier expansion into Asia caused by the Christian revival of the 1880s, the sportive “civilizing mission” gained momentum during the 1910s.
The Image of East Asian Backwardness in the Early 1910s
During the early 1910s, YMCA writers reported a variety of social dysfunctions to emphasize the desirability of the sportive “civilizing mission” in East Asia. American media and academic coverage of the Philippines during the first one-and-a-half decades following their annexation in 1899 had featured non-Christian ethnicities prominently. Most of these sometimes very controversial anthropological studies were compiled by Dean C. Worcester, a zoologist who from 1901 to 1913 served as the colony’s secretary of the interior.Footnote 19 One of his later studies called “Field Sports among the Wild Men of Northern Luzon” was published in National Geographic Magazine’s March 1911 issue. In this article, Worcester presents modern sports as an instrument to “civilize” Igorots (the “wild men”), whom he distinguishes from more “civilized” Christian Filipinos due to their headhunting and other “savage” practices. He stated, for instance, that sports would serve entertainment purposes and thereby keep Igorots away from heavy drinking and from murdering each other. Teaching amateur norms and values would also, in a long-lasting process, support a social transformation from “savagery” to an American-defined standard of civilization. Many of the photos showed Igorots dressed only in loincloths or skirts, further communicating an image of backwardness and “primitive” modes of production that only U.S. experts would be able to overcome.Footnote 20
Initially, YMCA reporting on its sports program in the Philippines featured some of Worcester’s images due to the aforementioned newly emerging cooperation between it and the colonial administration. Shortly after his arrival in the Philippines in 1910, Elwood Brown, physical director of the Manila YMCA, began networking with the Bureau of Education and the governor-general.Footnote 21 Bringing up the dramatic topic of “civilizing” Igorots in YMCA articles served to show that the YMCA also supported the spread of modern sports to tackle the roots of social dysfunction such as violence. Instead of merely defending Christian Filipinos against raids by headhunters, YMCA media stated that the living conditions of the latter would be successfully changed by sports programs with a view towards self-pacification. Association Men, the main membership publication of the YMCA, which was widely circulated among city and university YMCAs (more precise information on the print run has been lost),Footnote 22 published an article on the topic authored by Brown in its October 1912 issue. In the article, Brown informed readers that the “naked Igorots” now played volleyball, having learned it from the constabulary.Footnote 23 Less than a year later, in July 1913, an anonymous article, very likely drafted by Brown, communicated obvious successes in pacifying social interaction in Northern Luzon: “Even the head hunters of the interior, who when the first tree bloomed started their ghostly trail of blood, now engage in baseball and volley ball instead. The baseball bat has taken the place of the bolo.”Footnote 24 Thus, when reporting to an American audience about Philippine educational policy, both YMCA and colonial officials such as the director of education and the governor-general used the concept of sport substituting for headhunting.Footnote 25
Quite obviously, coverage of the cooperation between the colonial administration and the YMCA served to demonstrate to philanthropists that the YMCA’s activities were desired by the American elite and could use public institutions as multipliers in spreading sport, making the YMCA’s activities more efficient. The benefits of such official backing were useful in persuading potential, and potentially reluctant, donors to support the YMCA’s sports program abroad. After all, it was still difficult to judge whether the new foreign sports program would have a large-scale impact or would result in a waste of money due to lack of interest or even politico-cultural resistance in Asia.
Headhunters were only one of several topics YMCA media reported on. The main focus had always been on Christian Filipinos and on convincing readers that in their case the YMCA was successfully tackling the roots of different forms of social dysfunction: poverty and inadequate healthcare. For example, in June 1914 Physical Training published an article on these topics written by Brown. This YMCA publication focused on physical education topics and hence was of interest to not just YMCA members but also physical educators working at schools and universities (though again information on circulation has been lost). In his article, Brown informed readers about the rationalization of leisure through the YMCA’s and the Bureau of Education’s joint promotion of sports: “One of the biggest pieces of service the bureau has done the people is to substitute real athletic meets for the former ‘fiestas’, when drinking, cock fighting and immorality typified the activities.”Footnote 26 Mentioning attempts to limit alcohol consumption certainly served to appeal not just to American readers close to the temperance movement, but also to less radical ones in favour of moderate drinking.Footnote 27 The second topic—cockfighting—was one that must have addressed readers interested in another form of moral reform. Animal protection organizations such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals aimed at reducing animal suffering as much as possible and at preventing their use for blood sports.Footnote 28 Spreading sport to keep Filipinos away from cockfighting, which was often associated with gambling (instead of belief in personal effort), therefore became a frequently occurring theme in YMCA print media. About one year earlier, Association Men had published an article that explicitly addressed the theme: “Baseball Supplants the Cockpit.” As in later articles discussed below, the author explains that only old people went to the cockpits, while children had lost interest in them (see also Figure 1).Footnote 29 The message thus was that the YMCA’s and colonial administration’s promotion of school sports had successfully changed the leisure practices of the younger generation, and that in the long run cockfighting and associated social deficits would die out. Moreover, the article stated that the average height of Filipino students had increased.Footnote 30 This again communicated successes in the YMCA-initiated fitness reform. As a consequence, the desirability of the YMCA’s foreign sports program was further promoted to potential donors by contrasting sport as a scientific approach to fitness and public health with local practices such as cockfighting, which was presented as a socially undesirable blood sport with no scientifically proven health benefit.Footnote
This photo printed in an article published in the October 1920 issue of Association Men shows a cockfighting match. The corresponding text explains that due to the spread of Western sports young Filipino men and boys had lost their interest in cockfighting and, in those areas where it had been practiced, in headhunting.
Articles declaring Philippine leisure practices to be unscientific and irrational corresponded to similar articles written by YMCA physical directors serving in other Asian countries. For example in 1913, John H. Gray published an article in Physical Training that denied the physiological value of Indian yogic practices.Footnote 32 In 1916, Franklin H. Brown, serving in Japan, covered sumo, judo, and kendo (fencing) in two articles. One article appeared in Foreign Mail, an outreach organ of the YMCA whose main purpose was to inform readers—and possible donors—about its foreign work (information on its print run has also been lost). In this article, Franklin Brown told readers that the YMCA in Japan lacked trained physical education experts and thus was mainly limited to offering classes in jiu-jitsu (judo), kendo, and certain group games taught by local teachers, but that when Western sports classes became available at the Kobe YMCA, young men responded to these more “social forms of exercise.”Footnote 33 He thus declared martial arts less socially desirable than Western sports, hinting at their closeness to Japanese nationalism, the bushidō (“Way of the Warrior”), and military training.Footnote 34 The other article, printed in Physical Training, informed readers that sumo offered no health benefits and that it encouraged socially undesirable behaviour: “Regarding what restrictions on the sex instinct these wrestlers put upon themselves; there are none. They are a dissolute bunch for the most part, followed by a crowd of low women.”Footnote 35
In a nutshell, the articles communicated to philanthropists that the newly emerging foreign sports program that was spreading across Asia was necessary and desirable, since irrational and unscientific local practices were unable to improve the living conditions of Asians. At the same time the social scientific impression was created that a successful transfer of Protestant American practices would eventually lead to a transformation from “savagery” (head hunters) or higher levels of non-Western civilization towards Protestant, American-style democracy and capitalism. A logical outcome of such an assimilation process would be religious conversion or at least the reshaping of other faiths along Protestant American lines.
The Image of East Asian Peaceful Cooperation during the First World War
An event that heavily contributed to a new image of East Asian athletes was the Far Eastern Championship Games. Three events had successfully been hosted shortly before and during the First World War: Manila (1913), Shanghai (1915), and Tokyo (1917). The Tokyo Games in particular, to which Japan, China, and the Philippines all had sent ninety to a hundred athletes, had turned into a demonstration of Asian willingness to cooperate peacefully with one another according to amateur sports norms and values even as Europe was experienced a world war.Footnote 36
In June 1918, the World’s Work published an article called “Modern Athletics in the Far East.”Footnote 37 A leading monthly news magazine, the World’s Work prewar circulation was about 100,000, increasing to about 180,000 during the war.Footnote 38 The official author of the article was a certain Thomas Gregory,Footnote 39 who was certainly responsible for the article’s style and structure. However, a close comparison to Elwood Brown’s earlier and later writings and interviews shows very strong similarities in theme and in a variety of other details.Footnote 40 It thus seems obvious that Gregory must have interviewed Brown, who in January 1918 had left the Philippines,Footnote 41 or that Brown had co-authored the text.
The introduction suggests a contrast between the peaceful, American-guided East Asia and the European battlefields: “The oft-quoted remark that Waterloo was won on the athletic fields of Eton,Footnote 42 does not give organized play a more important part in international affairs than it is now assuming in the Far East, where American games are not only forging a link of sympathy between the Orientals and us; but are giving the Japanese, the Chinese, the Filipinos, and the rest a means of learning to know and respect each other.”Footnote 43 Expressed in a British context, the reference to Eton and the battle of Waterloo (1815) normally highlights the contribution of sport to character building and fitness, especially of officers. However, with regard to promoting the YMCA’s sportive “civilizing mission” in East Asia, Waterloo was not mentioned to inspire pride among readers, but hinted rather at Europe’s violent past and present. Contrasting the YMCA’s spreading of sportive internationalism in Asia to the European great power politics responsible for the outbreak of the World War hence came close to the rhetoric produced by the Committee on Public Information, Woodrow Wilson’s organ for propagating his government’s war aims.Footnote 44 As a consequence, the YMCA’s activities in East Asia now turned into a positive example of what an American victory in its self-assigned global struggle for a new international order founded on internationalism and global integration would lead to. The YMCA had already promoted this topic in connection with preparations for the 1915 Games,Footnote 45 although Japan’s Twenty-One Demands, leading to public outrage in China against further violations of its sovereignty, must have reduced its public relations value for some time. In 1918, however, East Asian athletes appeared in this rhetorical framework as role models for the voluntary acceptance of the superiority of American civilization, in contrast to the European great powers, particularly the Central Powers. In this context, it is important to remember that the YMCA and other organizations had collected $200 million for war-related social work, making clear the American people’s willingness to donate money in connection to the extraordinary event.Footnote 46 Connecting the YMCA’s other foreign activities to the war hence made sense in terms of public relations.
This idea of East Asians voluntarily accepting a superior American civilization was further underlined by the article’s recounting of the support the YMCA had received from some of East Asia’s most influential politicians and educators. Among them were Chinese President Yuan Shikai, founder of Waseda University and former Japanese Premier (1914–16) Ōkuma Shigenobu, Japanese Foreign Minister Motono Ichirō, Philippine President of the Senate Manuel L. Quezon, and Chinese Christian Zhang Boling, the founder of Western-style Nankai University.Footnote 47 Quite obviously, such a message of large-scale political support for the YMCA’s activities served to assure philanthropists that their money would not be wasted due to political resistance. However, the story left out some less positive-sounding details. Yuan, for example, was undeniably a problematic example, due to his antidemocratic stance and, since late 1915, his heavily resisted attempt to enthrone himself as a new Chinese emperor, which hardly fitted the YMCA’s aims. The text omitted these issues (which were rendered moot by Yuan’s death in 1916) and he appeared simply as a friendly though slightly paranoid man who donated a trophy in the spring 1915 and took an interest in Elwood Brown’s work.Footnote 48Footnote
More important was Ōkuma, who was depicted in several photos of the Third Games, held in Tokyo in 1917, and who may have already been senile (see Figure 2).Footnote 50 It is thus impossible to say whether he cared about the image the compilation of photos featuring him created among readers. It was said that Ōkuma had never smiled in public before, so these photographs constituted significant evidence of a new topic: that sports could teaching Asians (primarily Japanese) to show their emotions in public. Gregory thus used text and images to portray civilizational differences rooted in Confucian ideas of controlled and strictly regulated public behaviour and of a rigid divide between the public and the private sphere (which he dramatized quite strongly) as in the process of being overcome. Several of the photos, which occupied more space on the page than the actual text of the article, featured male and female Chinese and Japanese spectators celebrating, smiling, or waving flags. Due to the relatively young age of many of them, the author in one case made comparisons to American college students attending an athletic event.Footnote 51
These photos, called “Before and After,” show Japanese politician and educator Ōkuma Shigenobu at the Third Far Eastern Championship Games. According to their caption, he had never before smiled in public.
This trope of passive and unemotional Asians becoming fanatical supporters had already shown up in some earlier YMCA publications. The occasion had been the Second Far Eastern Championship Games in Shanghai in 1915, particularly the modified marathon run (eight miles). A Chinese runner running third as he re-entered the stadium for the last several hundred meters received such enthusiastic cheering from the crowd that he started sprinting, overtook one of the two leading Japanese runners, scored second place for China, and fell unconscious for some time afterwards.Footnote 52 All in all, the image created by Gregory’s article and others published around the same time was already moving in the direction of successful assimilation into Protestant American civilization and a sweeping aside of local cultural-religious customs. A degree of egalitarianism, though not equality, between male and female spectators also contributed to that image. YMCA writers thus informed philanthropists that there would be no cultural-religious resistance to their work from young people, further communicating that donations would not be wasted.
The article’s coverage of a change in clothing also is noteworthy. Many of the persons depicted (like Ōkuma) dressed in Western formal wear, sports uniforms, or school uniforms, while others appeared in kimonos. The intention most likely was to communicate to readers that the latter were still trapped in a backward tradition by connecting different clothing to Western and non-Western bodily practices, respectively. This is further illustrated by YMCA articles that discussed the robes and long fingernails of Confucian scholars, which were strongly associated with the rejection of physical exercise, and asceticism in India, which was also described as unhealthy and irrational.Footnote 53 Gregory underlined the same message by including a photo showing a baseball batter and catcher dressed in Western sports uniforms, standing in front of an umpire who wears a facemask but also a kimono and sandals.Footnote 54 The composition of the photo shows him as not really fitting in—to say nothing of the fact that potential donors might have considered him insufficiently protected against incoming balls. They nonetheless were confronted with an image that showed that even traditionally dressed people would not resist the sportive “civilizing mission.” Recounting successes and local support thus further served to emphasize the sport program’s efficiency, while simultaneously making the statement that a lot of people remained to be influenced, meaning that further donations were necessary.
Gregory also covered the continued promotion of Western sports in the Philippines. A photo of Filipino schoolchildren of both genders wearing Western clothing and engaging in mass calisthenics on Playground Day in Manila is noteworthy since it communicated a generational change (see Figure 3). Another photo showed girls playing indoor baseball, very likely with the intent of making it completely clear that girls, too, were to receive sportive citizenship training. The text informed readers that this was the result of the earlier cooperation between Brown and the Bureau of Education.Footnote 55 Reviving an older notion, the author also claimed that young people were now uninterested in cockfighting.Footnote 56 Improvements in public health and more rational leisure practices thus again served as a justification for both American colonialism and the YMCA’s activities.Footnote 57Footnote
The photo called “Play Ground Day at Manila” depicts hundreds of schoolchildren at a calisthenics drill. The photo thus communicates the emergence of a generation of disciplined and physically fit Filipinos.
The Image of East Asians as Role Models for the Non-Western World
After the First World War ended, the YMCA was eager to expand to other non-Western regions, communicating successes in East Asia as an example of what could be achieved elsewhere. In December 1921, Elwood Brown published an article called “Teaching the World to Play” in The Outlook.Footnote 59 Known as Christian Union until 1893, The Outlook was a leading Christian progressive weekly news magazine with a circulation of more than 100,000 copies.Footnote 60 Part of the historical background to Brown’s article was that during medical examinations following the U.S. entry into the war in 1917, close to half of all draftees had been diagnosed as having a physical defect, and about one-fifth were not inducted into the military.Footnote 61 While these findings had obvious military implications, the YMCA after the war came to the conclusion that public health and fitness were even more endangered than had been expected. In terms of the YMCA’s international activities, the findings led to the assumption that intensifying its physical education programs could overcome existing public health problems in other countries. Because the norms and values of amateur sport were thought to help acculturate people to the values of American Protestant citizenship, spreading amateur sport was also communicated as a desirable means of supporting postwar democratization in various countries.
The central person in this drive was Brown, who quickly rose within the YMCA’s ranks. Using the Far Eastern Championship Games as a model, in 1919 he organized the Inter-Allied Games among teams from the Allied countries. Afterwards, several European governments showed interest in the YMCA’s sports program and asked for assistance. A final impetus for globalizing the YMCA’s physical education activities was a meeting between Brown and the IOC. In 1920, when Olympic Games took place for the first time since their interruption by the war, Brown negotiated a working agreement with the IOC to set up regional games in “so-called backward areas” such as Latin America, the Balkans, the Near East, and West Asia.Footnote 62 Brown thus became the most vigorous promoter of the foreign sports program and, as an article about him put it, the “Physical evangelization of the many nations of the world.”Footnote 63
In “Teaching the World to Play”, Brown made East Asian athletes role models for other non-Western people. By late 1921, two further Far Eastern Championship Games events had taken place (Manila in 1919, and Shanghai in 1921), which underlined the continuing success of the sportive “civilizing mission.” Wholehearted support from Asian elites was again an important theme, and one with which he opened the article. His aim was to communicate to philanthropists that East Asian elites had sufficiently embraced amateur sports norms and values to be able to continue the YMCA’s work on their own in the near future, a message repeated two years later in connection with the Sixth Games (1923).Footnote 64 Announcing a successful indigenization process thus promised a cut in costs in East Asia, preventing a permanent donation drain. Such reporting mattered quite a lot, since the foreign department encountered huge budget deficits in 1920 and 1921 due to the twin pressures of expanding their presence into Europe and postwar economic problems affecting donors. Only after enquiring into the YMCA’s efficiency did John D. Rockefeller, Jr., decide to cover the deficits.Footnote 65
Much of the remaining text was a recapitulation of the successes described above. Amateur sports provided East Asians with training in peaceful and non-violent interaction, taught them (especially the Japanese) to show their emotions in public (illustrated by one of the photos already used in Gregory’s article), challenged the Chinese scholars’ exclusive focus on studying, convinced both male and female Igorot schoolchildren (barefoot but otherwise wearing clothes) to play indoor baseball instead of learning to kill each other and to take heads, and made Christian Filipinos more willing to engage in physical exercise. The last point also featured prominently in an article written the same year by one of Brown’s successors in the Philippines, who dramatically claimed that the YMCA had proven wrong the thesis of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden”, written in 1899 to encourage the U.S. to annex and “civilize” the Philippines: “It [Play] has done, with the youth at least, what Kipling said couldn’t be done. It has measurably hurried that part of the East.”Footnote 66 Since the YMCA had renewed its attempts to set up national games in India, Brown added the overcoming the caste system as another rationale for the promotion of amateur sports. Because they encouraged choosing athletes based on their competence instead of their caste, they would bring people of different castes together as equals.Footnote 67
As a consequence, East Asian sport appeared to have advanced further along the YMCA’s defined path and East Asia seemed superior to other non-Western regions still needing complete YMCA guidance. The “play for everybody” message of Brown’s article, which included the intention of affecting masses of non-Westerners, thus is interesting. The desire to globalize the YMCA’s activities was, after all, the reason why the article worked to create such a glowing image of the organization’s success in spreading sports and transforming societies in East Asia.
Without clear-cut success stories, even if some of them were exaggerated or sounded very dramatic, donors’ belief in the expertise of the YMCA and its ability to repeat the founding of regional games in other regions might be lower. The need to attract additional donations for the expensive new project was obvious, since the foreign department’s deficits meant that otherwise no expansion would be possible. In March 1920, Brown had informed Mott that $54,000 needed to be added to the budget in 1920, and $108,000 the following year, to send eighteen additional physical directors abroad.Footnote 68 Certainly due to the huge deficits, Brown in his article (for the first time, as far as I can determine) directly and openly appealed to rich individuals or clubs to finance physical directors. According to Brown, as personal representatives of the donors these men could improve the lives of thousands of people. Moreover, he promised that regular reports would inform donors about the physical directors’ activities, thus offering them some control over how their money was used.Footnote 69 Providing a schematic of the plan to establish, together with the IOC, new local, national, and eventually regional events as a way to encourage mass sport among non-Western peoples further served to underline the YMCA’s expertise and its network of existing connections.Footnote 70
Brown’s article can thus be interpreted as the starting signal for globalizing the sportive “civilizing mission” of encouraging international cooperation and democratization. After all, several semi-academic articles published about that time in YMCA journals explicitly focused on the value of amateur sports norms and values to advancing democratic citizenship.Footnote 71 Moreover, the keywords of the article’s title, Teaching (the) World (to) Play, afterwards were used in a variety of similar articles in YMCA publications such as Association Men and Physical Training.Footnote 72
When talking about The Outlook, which had a slightly different readership than YMCA journals, it needs to be mentioned that the news magazine had already reported on the founding of the Far Eastern Championship Games in 1913.Footnote 73 Certainly an important reason for the renewed interest in 1921 was a meeting between Brown and Katherine Mayo, a well-known writer and journalist with more than two decades of experience. She was also well-connected, her first book, published in 1917, even having included an introduction by former President Theodore Roosevelt. Some of her later works were highly controversial, such as The Isles of Fear (1925), a rejection of Philippine independence, and the even more provocative Mother India (1927), which was translated into thirteen European and Indian languages and claimed that Hindu sexual obsession would lead to child marriages, the sexual exploitation of women, homosexuality, and masturbation.Footnote 74 An earlier, and in this article’s context more important book, “That Damn Y”: A Record of Overseas Service (1920), had challenged claims that the YMCA had wasted donations it had received for its war work during the First World War. Among other topics, the book featured a long overview of Brown’s activities, such as the hosting of the Inter-Allied Games.Footnote 75 Mayo was thus a useful collaborator in promoting the desirability and efficiency of the newly devised global sports program. In the end, she and Brown convinced The Outlook to publish one article on the YMCA’s efforts by each of them, preceded by two other, anonymous ones.Footnote 76 In this way the quantity of promotional information, and Mayo’s growing profile, increased the attention of potential donors to the YMCA’s new plans. Moreover, much of Mayo’s article focused on themes similar to those in Brown’s article, except for its introduction, which was an absurd story about German student representatives being sick of military drills but never having heard about modern sports, who then were enlightened by the YMCA.Footnote 77 Despite such wrong claims that German students would be unfamiliar with sports, Mayo’s piece echoed the message that was to be sent: the experience gained by the YMCA in East Asia would be a guarantee of a successful global outreach—including Weimar Germany— of the sportive “civilizing mission” aimed at supporting democratic transformation and improving public health. To underline the experience, East Asian athletes in all articles had been turned into a vanguard among non-Western athletes.
The Image of Successful Assimilation in the Late 1920s
In the late 1920s, the YMCA communicated its successes in social transformation in other non-Western regions, based on the experience it had gained in East Asia, a region that was therefore now associated with assimilation instead of social deficits. In August 1928, Association Men published an article called “Where Once Stood Walls”, which reads almost like a reprint of a 1926 piece entitled “The Nations Learn to Play.”Footnote 78 Its author was Frank B. Lenz, a University of California graduate who in 1914–15 served as immigration secretary of the San Francisco YMCA and between 1916 and 1922 as a YMCA secretary in China, focusing on recreation and student work. In 1922, Lenz had been transferred to the YMCA’s headquarters in New York. There, he became responsible for public relations and fundraising.Footnote 79 Lenz was thus one of the key people involved in promoting the YMCA’s global activities (Elwood Brown had died in 1924) and who, significantly, had personally experienced events in East Asia.
The main topic of Lenz’s article was the shrinking of distance due to new technologies and the danger of science uncontrolled by ethics.Footnote 80 As one might expect, his Christian internationalist answer to these problems included international sport. One example, reprising his earlier writings, was a short summary of the first trip of a Chinese soccer team to New Zealand in 1924, which had been organized by the YMCA. Reflecting on assimilation, Lenz primarily focused on the impression the Chinese sportsmen made on New Zealanders: “They gave a good account of themselves. They showed that they were not laundrymen, fruit vendors or chop suey restaurant waiters. They ate with knives and forks, and wore European dress. They believed in their country and were proud of their traditions and heritage.”Footnote 81 Lenz apparently did not consider dining habits and clothing to be part of Chinese tradition and heritage. What he had in mind might have been art or literature, but when talking about everyday behaviour he considered acting according to Western civilizational standards the only acceptable norm. In this regard, the Chinese athletes had successfully assimilated. In the narrative, New Zealanders therefore accepted them; but Lenz’s aim was certainly to create a similar acceptance among his American readers to illustrate what the YMCA’s global sports program had achieved in East Asia. Moreover, the idea that sportive internationalism and assimilation could solve the problem of non-biological (civilizational) racism was also important against the background of the YMCA’s fight against anti-Asian immigration laws in New Zealand, Australia and, obviously, the United States. In 1926, two years before Lenz’s article was published, John Mott during a trip to Australia had campaigning against Asian exclusion.Footnote 82 Lenz, in turn, as immigration secretary of the San Francisco YMCA had witnessed the rejection Asian immigrants experienced in the U.S. due to their different civilizational background.Footnote 83
Illustrations to philanthropists of the YMCA’s competence in assimilating Asians through sport thus were not limited to Asian societies, but also concerned the United States. As another article reported, the YMCA could efficiently tackle the roots of Asian-American related social unrest in California.Footnote 84 The topic of assimilation was further underlined by Lenz’s discussion of Asians coming to the U.S. to study and on youth exchange programs, which was supported by photos.Footnote 85 For example, one photo showed a Filipino soccer team dressed in Western clothes. The Filipinos were all identified as attending Cornell University, thereby even more strongly communicating the message of a successful transfer of Western education to East Asia (see Figure 4)Footnote .
The photo depicted in Lenz’s article of 1928 shows a Filipino soccer team competing in Cornell University’s Inter-Fraternity Championship in 1923. The message to readers is that the new Philippine elite has been assimilated into American civilization through higher education and sports.
A final topic Lenz discussed was the YMCA’s physical education activities, especially in Central-Eastern Europe and Latin America, which included further “friendship tours” by teams, national health weeks, and city and state-wide health campaigns.Footnote 87 The focus was no longer on differences, but on similarities (though obviously still biased in favour of the Western standard). The article’s overall message thus was that the experience the YMCA had gained in supporting social transformation through sport in East Asia, and the global circulation of this experience, had resulted in noticeable successes in other regions of the world. Further articles written at about the same time also addressed the Near East and other places.Footnote 88
When discussing donation campaigns, it is interesting to note that the changing image of East Asian sport during the 1920s was also supported by YMCA lantern-slide presentations. This precursor to “PowerPoint” was shown to prospective donors all over the U.S. while texts were read to them. Lantern-slide presentations thus created a different atmosphere than reading print media, since presenters certainly added further information and often stories based on personal experience when addressing groups of people. Presentations on Asian countries in 1924–25 covered Japan, China, India, and “foreign boys”. Some slides on India featured ascetics mutilating themselves and “idols” of Indian gods. Slides depicting rural areas in China and Japanese-occupied Korea certainly aimed to evoke among audiences the impression of a backwardness that could be overcome by the YMCA if sufficient money was made available. Slides on physical training and other activities in urban settings, in contrast, did not include such imagery.Footnote 89 These slides instead communicated the message that the YMCA had achieved—sometimes tremendous—success in uplifting East Asians. The lantern-slide collections therefore also formed part of the strategy of using successes in East Asia to promote further activities in still seemingly backward areas all over the world. Four years later, in 1929, another presentation called “Physical Activities of the YMCA” displayed the successes of the global sports program by showing programs taking place in eighteen countries. The vast global network (or “moral empire”) the YMCA had created included Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Italy, Korea, Latvia, Japan, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey.Footnote 90 As in Lenz’s and other articles, the focus of this presentation was now no longer on contrasting images of Western “progress” and others’ “backwardness”, but on commonalities. In order to illustrate its own efficiency, the YMCA thus had “de-Orientalized” the images of East Asians that it had promoted during the 1910s. Simultaneously, it communicated that other regions, too, had now made noteworthy progress in following the path towards assimilation that had first been set in East Asia.
Conclusion
During the 1910s and 1920s, the presentation of non-Western athletes, particularly those from East Asia, in YMCA and Christian progressive media became increasingly similar to the image of white American Protestant athletes. One of the central reasons for this development was changes in American philanthropy that necessitated explanations of how donations were used in a scientific and rational way that led to manifest successes. Seen from the YMCA’s perspective, supporting assimilation through sport would eliminate non-biological (civilizational) racism towards non-Westerners. Moreover, sports as training for democratic and capitalist citizenship and as a scientific means of improving public health would further tackle the roots of social dysfunction instead of only easing symptoms. When the foreign department’s sports program gained momentum in the 1910s, the common aims in the Philippines of the colonial administration and the YMCA were addressed, since covering their cooperation emphasized the desirability of YMCA sports work. One of the topoi with which philanthropists were confronted was that of sport as a tool to turn headhunters into former headhunters by discouraging violence among people. YMCA publications also promoted sports work as necessary, based on their presentation of local leisure practices as irrational and lacking a scientific basis.
After the United States’ entry into the First World War, YMCA public relations integrated the sportive “civilizing mission” in East Asia into Wilsonian war propaganda. They thereby contrasted East Asian sport to the European battlefields, telling potential donors that the spread of Protestant American civilization would discourage war. They also confronted readers with further successes in assimilating Asians, particularly members of the younger generation of both genders. Evidence provided was changes in clothing and social customs. Moreover, YMCA sources increasingly portrayed East Asian officials and politicians as having sufficiently internalized amateur sports norms and values to be able to take over the sportive “civilizing mission.” Such reports corresponded to the desire of philanthropists that locals should, after stable structures had been created and knowledge transferred, become responsible for financing and continuing the activities.
Some authors obviously exaggerated when describing clear-cut success stories and they ignored or left out certain setbacks: this was symptomatic of their intentions. After all, in the early 1920s the YMCA’s foreign department faced huge deficits at a time when Elwood Brown was simultaneously arguing for an expensive globalization of the foreign sports program. To appeal to donors by highlighting the YMCA’s expertise and efficiency, Brown and his supporters even more clearly situated East Asian athletes in the vanguard among non-Western peoples. By showing great successes in the transfer of norms and values to East Asia, the YMCA presented itself as sufficiently experienced and competent to repeat the same in other non-Western regions. Further articles and lantern-slide collections from the late 1920s intensified this message. The media also showed philanthropists the systematic application of knowledge gained in East Asia to support social transformation processes in many other countries, before the YMCA needed to strongly reduce its foreign work during the Great Depression.
The basic foundation of this image production was obviously a deep belief in the superiority and universality of Protestant American civilization. Discussing the topic of whether East Asian and other non-Western athletes indeed represented successful assimilation or, instead, they perceived themselves as attempting to modernize East Asian civilizations was therefore undesirable, even though it had huge consequences for the question of whether they would eventually follow the path Americans had foreseen for them.
