Homo Ludens at War

Soon after the ink dried on the Treaty of Versailles, National Geographic noted a curious thing. “The maddest war men ever fought has had a tendency to turn the world to simple, wholesome play,” it read. The sporty activities promoted behind the trenches paid righteous dividends. To play sport was to practice battle. The world was now aware that, in both, only the morally strong survived. The underlying anthropological fact was clear: sport instills morals as it advances civilization. Ancient ludic expression was fun practice for modern benevolent empire. Plainly, “the World War has helped stress a higher claim for sport.”Footnote ⁸

The YMCA provided the Christian rationale, the manpower, the athletic equipment, and the know-how to validate this “higher claim.” President Woodrow Wilson backed the healthful and righteous cause. For a world at war, the Y was a national endowment and a boon to moral-physical culture. The President spoke:

Whatever the Y had, the United States government wanted.

In April 1917, just as the United States officially declared war on Imperial Germany, the Commission on Training Camp Activities formed with the twofold stated purpose of retaining the “normalities of life” and keeping military camps “clean and wholesome.” It was no small task, as some of these military camps contained as many as fifty thousand men. Fortunately for the Commission, there was already an agency that specialized in wholesome cleanliness. In fact, the Commission had no need to create “any new machinery,” thanks to the Y. In close cooperation with the Commission and “free of charge,” the Y got the job. In these early stages, however, the United States military only had about one-tenth the funds necessary to keep its soldiers fit to fight. The YMCA provided millions of dollars’ worth of recreational and social buildings, tents, musical instruments, stationary, motion picture machines, phonographs, and libraries. Less than six months after the United States declared war, the YMCA had more than two thousand war–work secretaries appointed in the field, and one thousand more were being prepped. Its services were appreciated. After returning from the AEF lines in France, Luther Gulick was reassured. “Physical training never has had such a prominent place as it has on the fighting front,” he stated in an address to the American Physical Education Association in April 1918, “because never before was it so evidently an important part of winning the war.” Working together, the YMCA and the American military could save souls and win wars; together, they could increase physical vigor and spread democratic values.Footnote ¹⁰

To make the most athletic and deadly player-fighters, the YMCA-military championed one sport above all others. “Special emphasis is laid on boxing,” wrote Dr. Joseph E. Raycroft, physical training director for the Commission on Training Camp Activities. The military needed “hard competitive sports that develop the fighting instinct.” Aiding white infantry in their metamorphosis from civilian to soldier, YMCA boxing turned the passive and docile into the actively aggressive. Said one camp General, “Boxing, undoubtedly, is one of the most useful forms of physical training which a soldier can have.” Boxing not only taught men how to fight but also made men want to fight. They most certainly had to. If machine guns and barbed wire defined “no man's land,” then hand-to-hand, close-proximity fighting characterized the trenches. Boxing developed that “proper fighting spirit,” Chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities Raymond Fosdick claimed, as well as a “willingness and ability to fight at close quarters and give and take punishment.” Soldiers were forced to take pain so they could give pain. By September 1918, boxing had been made “a regular and definite part of the daily routine” in many of the principle camps and white regiments. Heavily promoted, this favorite soldier sport caught on. “The whole thrill of the thing never failed,” wrote one commentator, “and you found it everywhere, in England, in France, in Germany, in small and isolated units as in great centres—the boxing interest, staged, provisioned, and supervised by the athletic instructors of the Y.” With pugilistic product in a nearly global bazaar, the YMCA marketed in godly aggression, and the military aggressed.Footnote ¹¹

For the sake of health, death, and virtue, several logics converged in the governmental and Christian institutional push for boxing. Chief among them was an assumption of utility. As Joyce Carol Oates said of the sweet science, one doesn't “play” boxing as one might play basketball. The YMCA-military knew it. Whereas YMCA basketball taught social cooperation, YMCA boxing instilled innate aggression. For those with bellicose intentions, then, boxing was thought to have real-life, martial application. In a more intimate, hands-on struggle for life, boxing was perfect. Luther Gulick appreciated the sport. “We all thought that the invention of gunpowder and the ability to kill from a distance made physical speed, strength and endurance of less value than it used to be in the old days,” he said. “We thought that the war was to be won mainly by head work and that the body was not so important as it used to be when battles were settled by hand-to-hand encounter.” They thought wrong, however, for this was a war of bodies, or so the logic went. Few knew bodies like the YMCA.Footnote ¹²

As a promoter of gamely merriment, the YMCA retooled itself in its wartime boxing program as a bringer of death and destruction. In Hand-to-Hand Fighting: A System of Personal Defense for the Soldier, A. E. Marriott, physical director for the Army YMCA at Camp Sevier, South Carolina, advised, “This volume constitutes a deadly system whose climax is nothing less than the destruction or crippling of the opponent.” With helpful pictures, this Y director illustrated a variety of ways to dispatch belligerent bodies. “Never miss an opportunity to destroy the eyes of the enemy,” Marriott counseled boldly. “In all head holds use the fingers on the eyes.” Plenty of other body parts were vulnerable too. Necks were certainly soft. He wrote, “Never give the enemy a chance to recover after he is thrown, but stamp upon the neck with the foot.” When it came to neck stompings, however, Marriott implored his students to not merely kick the neck, but rather “jump on it with the full weight of the body.” When used for the imperial good, dirty boxing had its place.Footnote ¹³

The Springfield College YMCA published deadly advice as well. In “War Games and Hand-to-Hand Fighting,” soldiers learned about pie-eating contests and other fun games, alongside various deadly maneuvers. The object of hand-to-hand fighting was “to destroy [the] opponent, or to cause intense pain, forcing surrender,” the authors claimed. The most effective points of attack included the eyes, groin, throat, solar plexus, and spine. Along with boxing, moves like the “arm-break,” the “head-twist and eye-gouge,” and the “forearm thrust and crotch hold” were useful. In the tactical application of sports, this was a YMCA for physical fitness and for physical destruction.Footnote ¹⁴

Army and YMCA officials seized on the notion that boxing and bayonet fighting were peas in a pod and well suited for trench bloodletting. The public was reassured. “Bayonet fighting is boxing with a gun in your hands,” read an Outing article in May 1918.Footnote ¹⁵ Figureheads such as Joseph E. Raycroft endorsed boxing. “The experience of the past year in the training camps shows that boxing has great value as a preparation for bayonet fighting, and in the development of those physical and spiritual qualities that are characteristic of the aggressive fighting man,” he wrote in September 1918.Footnote ¹⁶ As physical training director for the Commission on Training Camp Activities, what Raycroft said, went. By fall 1918 at Camp Pike, Arkansas, soldiers were taking two courses a day (from 7 am to 11 am and 1 pm to 5 pm) in bayonet fighting, boxing, and various combat trainings.Footnote ¹⁷ Willing or no, “soft” soldiers were forced to reckon with their softness. The transformation of an overcivilized white body into its true natural form required a great deal of strenuous action. Raycroft and others were quick to stake a higher claim for boxing and bayonets. Camps were quick to heighten themselves. Soldiers were quickly compelled to oblige.

The perfectly paired and lethal skillsets received extended praise. Chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities Raymond Fosdick was another advocate of blades and boxing. As he told the Academy of Political Science in December 1917, “We are particularly interested in developing boxing, and have placed a boxing instructor in every camp.” He reasoned, “Boxing is intimately related to bayonet fighting. Our men must be good bayonet fighters, and they must therefore be good boxers.” Bodies needed weapons. Bodies were weapons. “Our fundamental aim in all this work,” Fosdick said, “is to create a fighting machine.”Footnote ¹⁸ Good fighting machines pivot on an angle when lunged at, counter-hook off the right straight, uppercut on the inside, rotate the hips when slashing, and, of course, use the fingers on the eyes with all head holds. Skilled or no, “masculine” or other, fist-work and bayonet play were the soldiers’ daily task.

Luther Gulick agreed. Boxing and bayonet fighting were essential for turning the mollycoddled white masses into hardened hordes. In his booklet for troops, “Physical Fitness in the Fighting Armies,” Gulick included an entire section on bayonet tactics. Echoing Fosdick, Gulick told the American Physical Education Association that, along with proper morals, such martial tactics make a man “a better fighting machine.” Indeed, Central Powers and previous armies of the world “have never been moral armies because they have not understood the relation between morality and the ability to fight,” said Gulick. With the assistance of fists, knives, and the YMCA, Allied armies were both tactically and morally advantaged. The flesh, blood, and bone altered in the trenches by clinched hands and honed knives was a lesser cost for the greater good. “The world is in labor,” Gulick bargained from afar “Bloodshed and agony are the price we must pay for the rebirth of the world—a rebirth of personal morality on the basis of service to others, a birth of world-conscious morality as applied for the first time to nations and peoples, the birth of team work in morals and religion.”Footnote ¹⁹ Sacrificial bodies sustained an empire. Knives and fists destroyed as they created, slaughtered as they saved.Footnote ²⁰

For the YMCA-military, the ability of boxing to heighten soldierly skills on the battlefield clearly translated to an ability to create manly, soldierly virtues in overly domesticated white soldiers. While training flesh and bone, hardening men daily for the bellicose test to come, boxing also instructed mind and spirit. Boxing toughened soldiers for the here and the hereafter. True, the sweet science was deadly. For every man boxing destroyed, however, boxing made another. An article in the December 1917 Ladies Home Journal addressed “To every wife and mother of a boy in khaki” advised readers that if they were “worrying about him,” then don't, for “he is a better man in every sense than when he left,” and now “he is hard as nails.” Jeopardized by their own civilized whiteness, white soldiers willing to close their fists were salvaged by the war. They were hardened, to be sure, but not too hard. The article went on to explain that YMCA secretaries were “the type of [men]” who would have our boys reading the Bible by Christmas and “without asking them to either.”Footnote ²¹ Reminding forgetful hominids of their fistic skills with “nature's weapons,” the war and the YMCA helped white men find that beautiful balance between brutishness and civility.

For white player-fighters, aggression was essential. Aggression was moral, useful, natural, and godly; it was also scarce, or so went the YMCA-military logic. Aggression was a culturally, racially forgotten thing. It had to be retaught. Joseph Raycroft lamented that “the great majority of our young men have had little or no experience in physical contact games that develop self-reliance, courage, quick thinking, and quick decisions under fire.” Fresh-faced recruits tended to lack manly pluck. Regrettably, American culture did not produce good player-fighters. Through the infrastructural aid of the Y, however, pacified white bodies were reminded of their inner savage. Raycroft continued, “Boxing supplies this important contest factor and furnishes a means of training men to keep their heads and to carry out an effective plan of attack, even though they are being punished by their opponents.” Boxing was much more than boxing. Knowledge of boxing supplied trust in self. Boxers could both take and give pain, as a soldier should. As Ariel Glucklich argues, the process was “to transform the pain that causes suffering into a pain that leads to insight, meaning, and even salvation.” However unpleasant, boxing beat aggression and a sense of righteous indignation into men. After a single lesson, in the words of one camp general, men “begin to show an aggressiveness, which they did not previously have, and which is absolutely necessary, not only in bayonet exercises, but in all personal encounters.” Manly aggression reformed white “powder puffs,” dispatched hostile Huns, and saved society. Through pain, pugilism prompted those repressed, God-given instincts.Footnote ²²

True, the practice of boxing benefited physical technique. Alongside this racial self-reformation, however, so, too, did boxing impart certain intangible qualities. Speaking of the war, Luther Gulick wrote, just before his death, about the “value of the fighting spirit.” “After all the physical preparation has been made,” he said, “it is morale that wins games, establishes great business, and governs a city or country.” Gulick regarded things both visible and nonvisible. Victory was born not merely of superior tactics. In war, as in life, godly manliness would win the day. For the finest example, Gulick waxed adoringly about the (unmixed) bouts between Billy Wells and Georges Carpentier. “Even at great physical disadvantage,” Gulick wrote, it was “the side or individual with the fighting spirit, and with the ability to apply that spirit,” that stood proudly in the end. The YMCA and its boxing program played no small part in Allied conquest. Aggression begat morals and morale. Gulick justified his belief, saying, “The service of the Young Men's Christian Association in the American Expeditionary Force is to assist in developing and maintaining morale through the promotion of moral ideas of conduct, good-fellowship, recreation, and religion.”Footnote ²³ WWI was a war of bodies and the inner qualities that they possessed.

Boxing was imagined to fit nicely within the changing wartime sensibilities. Indeed, the war prompted a refashioning of moral standards, explicitly and intentionally gerrymandering values and ethics. “Much of the world is finding Christ anew in rich and unexpected ways,” said Edward Arthur Wicher in his course of Bible study for soldiers. The atrocities of war exposed new ways of being human, of living righteously, and of creating a godly world order. The war added a unique level of reality. Bloodshed revealed a new Christianity. The war “brought about a revelation of the chasm now existing between the average man and the institutions and doctrines of Christianity,” claimed one chaplain. Different from African-American interpretations of the war, which tended to emphasize suffering and sacrifice, as Jonathan Ebel points out, this was a largely white theological revision that emphasized violence and virtue. In Ebel's words, “black soldiers and war workers did not see this violence as imitative of Christ.” In these wartime theological revisions, the ideological lionization of war violence and boxing brutality was a white project. In the cultural quest to salvage a damaged manhood, it was white soldiers who needed to find themselves, to redefine themselves through strenuous violence and bloodshed. Therein, they found Christ.Footnote ²⁴

The Committee on the War and the Religious Outlook—a joint project of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America and the General War-Time Commission of the Churches—theologized accordingly. Gathering various white protestant representatives, the Committee sought “self-examination” and to “consider the state of religion as revealed or affected by the war.” Talking to the player-fighters, the Committee used the YMCA's resources—questionnaires, chaplains, secretaries, conferences, and interviews—and found prominent concerns for “reality” in the field. Soldiers wanted something applicable, contemporary, literal, concrete, and intelligible. Heady and ethereal religious notions had no place. “War carried men out into the borders of life where they met the ‘harder’ facts of pain and death and the physical impact of man with man,” read the Committee report. The Y tapped into the violence of the times and rebranded itself with a simple but ferocious theology. It was partial ecumenism, born of what were assumed to be common bodily experiences. Religious truths were affirmed in pain and fear. When it came to discerning wartime rights and wrongs, the Y followed the soldiers, and the soldiers followed the Y. Like Jesus and like soldiers, “true Christians are always fighting men,” Wicher taught, and “Christianity is a religion of courage.” Fight with righteous impunity, then, for “God made man in his image,” he said. Earthly actions had heavenly synecdoche. For those white soldiers in the trenches, God was they. Be as “the Good Soldier of Jesus Christ.” Sanctifying their violent deeds with benevolent interpretation, as Jonathan Ebel argues, the idea was “to re-imagine religious authority in ways that placed soldiers beyond reproach.” Guided by their aggressive “instincts,” the solders’ violence was righteousness in the flesh.Footnote ²⁵

The ubiquitous death, the bodies dismembered, gassed and burned, the murderous imaginings, and the paralyzing trepidation were all cause for a new theological reimagining. The trenches were not godless quagmires. The trenches were imagined as special spaces for godly comportment, bloody and bellicose. Elaine Scarry argues that “what is quite literally at stake in the body in pain is the making and unmaking of the world,” so, too, in this wartime understanding of violence. Soldiers and figureheads refigured the chaos and death and made a world as it was unmade, as it were. The war was a macabre education of the senses, ripe with potential for Christian revision. As such, the feeling of courage was a gift. “The Spirit inspires men with joy and assurance of victory,” Wicher championed. Courage displayed a given Truth. The feeling of fear, then, was misguided—the body's mistaken response to a lack of ultimate knowledge. In Wicher's words, “we should not fear him who can slay the body only.” Such fear was a falsehood. Soldiers should fear only God. Courageous trench-boxers were paragons. The idea, as put by the YMCA's Religious Work Department, was that the “religious message fits right into the issues of the war.” Religion was for dominating fear and providing a “steady morale.”Footnote ²⁶

In an attempt to correct an unfortunate lack of appreciation for life in the trenches, even the commonplace soldierly longing for home was subject to YMCA emotional reform. The beauty of the Y's war work, as the YMCA director of the Religious Work Department for France claimed, was that it “relates the newly awakened home hunger of the soldiers to the half-conscious hunger for God himself.”Footnote ²⁷ To understand and harness the experience of the war and reconceive it accordingly was the Y way. The YMCA surveyed emotion, taught emotion, changed emotion. In boxing and in war, the YMCA found its place under the skin. It was a bodily matter of teaching that which was presumed to be untaught, reflexive, and visceral. It was a matter of naming an instinct and making it so. Courage, fear, longing, aggression—the YMCA-military managed all of these.

Through YMCA-military propaganda, boxing was entangled in a refashioning of morals, a renegotiation of Christianity, a reeducation of the senses, and a racialized mission for self-discovery. Under the rubric of “sport,” boxing was the perfect front for the YMCA to enact its ongoing quest to instill Christian virtue through play. This was war, however, and boxing provided martial virtue and then some. Boxing could do it all. “Give boxing a trial,” heavyweight champion and Y man Eddie Eagan told his fellow soldiers; it “will aid mightily to unfold a courageous personality, self-control and the physical poise which will make you an attractive friend.”Footnote ²⁸

Boxing appealed to white soldiers and YMCA-military figureheads for its character-building effects and its application in the field, but it was practical in other ways, too. First, it was cheap, as it required relatively little equipment. Second, it could be “taught” to lots of people at the same time (or so the Y and the Athletic Commission advertised). With thousands and thousands of boxing gloves in tow, the YMCA-military quickly mobilized mass hordes of white boxing “instructors” for the quick boxing instruction of mass hordes of white soldiers. Big numbers were important, and to change individual affect was the goal. In the words of Elwood Brown, the director of the YMCA National Department of Athletics:

Bravado, not reality, was the point. Training flesh and spirit, the YMCA-military sought to create its player-fighters by the thousands. Such was the factory floor that manufactured the AEF “fighting machine.” Boxing, death-knowledge, and exercise were inexpensive, expedited, and mass produced.

Professionals, amateurs, and newly taught teachers coached AEF troops in the sweet science, usually daily. Shortly after its formation, the Commission on Training Camp Activities appointed a special Committee on Athletic Instruction consisting of white champion pugilists and accomplished athletes. The committee—including James “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, Norman “Kid McCoy” Selby, Robert Edgren, Richard Melligan, and “Professor” Michael Donovan—worked in cooperation with the YMCA to establish and oversee the boxing program. Their purpose was to develop a curriculum for camp training and bring the sport to the frontlines. They did so immediately. In the early stages of American involvement in WWI, in fall 1917, more than fifty boxing instructors and “famous boxers,” including Benny Leonard, Johnny Dundee, Johnny Kilbane, Packy McFarland, and many other notables, were enlisted to give instruction at military camps. To help standardize boxing education, the military even made an instructional video with Kid McCoy, Jim Corbett, Johnny Kilbane, and Benny Leonard demonstrating “the fundamental principles of boxing.” The military created entire courses and established entire schools for the instruction of boxing instructors.Footnote ³⁰

By the hundreds and thousands, soldiers learned how to hit and how to get hit, how to fight and how to like fighting. Bellicose architects initiated the means to turn boxing into a soldierly habitus. The AEF practiced their jabs, hooks, crosses; trained their counters; tested their parries and blocks; and drilled their pivots and footwork. With close to fifteen hundred men simultaneously working under the pugilistic tutelage of Billy Armstrong, for instance, the First, Second, and Third Battalions of the 337th Infantry Brigade conducted the “World's Largest Boxing Class” at Camp Custer, Michigan, in June 1918. With a small wooden platform and a bullhorn, the YMCA-military exponentially increased production of its boxers. Camp Las Casas in Puerto Rico taught boxing to entire battalions of one thousand men. Thirty thousand men took boxing lessons every day in yet another camp.Footnote ³¹ Next to one Y camp building stood five such boxing instruction platforms, each of which was outfitted with electric lights. The YMCA-military was expert in mass instruction. YMCA physical directors sought the latest physical culture methods in handling such great numbers. Learning from a specialist in mass boxing, physical directors adopted a system of the “science of the game so that actions are performed subconsciously, automatically, just as one would walk or breathe.” The drilling made the many wayward and cowardly men more like the men they were made to be. YMCA officials argued that athletics and boxing “[make] men exceed the powers they believe themselves to possess,” giving them the ability to “leap a trench or a strand of barbed wire” and to simulate “the fighting spirit.”Footnote ³² Bravado, rather than accurate thought, was the aim. The military-sports complex was nothing if not efficient, producing cheaply made, swiftly instructed killers with character.

Soldierly affect did not arise only from drilling; it also came from watching. As an ideal sport for the “mass play” idea—with so many participants building so much character—boxing provided good, clean entertainment. “It is almost not on record that there ever was a boxing programme in the AEF that did not play to a capacity crowd,” reported Elwood Brown. The YMCA had amassed many player-fighters and many fans; the organization quantified its influence. August 1918 saw 6,256 participants and 97,977 spectators; September, 22,156 participants and 219,906 spectators; October, 33,722 participants and 365,691 spectators; and November, 45,136 participants and 358,549 spectators. Again, with the help of the YMCA, the AEF put on an average of eighty boxing shows a week. The scale of boxing's popularity was unprecedented.Footnote ³³

The dignitaries admired boxing, and the people loved it. If not all could be privy to the hand-to-hand exchanges in the trenches, then all could be a party to the fistic bouts in the ring. Labor leader Samuel Gompers was a fan of the AEF shows. “I love this kind of thing,” he said. “I think that these are the kind of fighters that threw the fear of God into the Huns.” Boxing was a testament. Upon being “spattered with blood at his ringside seat during a particularly vicious boxing match,” the Prime Minister of France, M. Clemenceau, finally “registered enthusiastic appreciation of the American soldier.” The type of man who boxing created for the war was the type of man boxing created for the ring. With a newly instilled zeal for bloodlust, fans wanted to see player-fighters play-fighting. Run by “the YMCA man,” Mr. Drechko, “vast crowds” attended the informal bouts each Friday night on the YMCA platform at Camp Mabry in Texas in fall 1918. Weekly fights were standard. Special boxing events were common. Camp Hancock in Georgia hosted a “Boxing Carnival” for the “benefit of the camp athletic fund” in September that year. About fifteen thousand people attended. The YMCA even leased the eight-thousand-seat-capacity Cirque de Paris for two months just after Armistice to put on boxing shows. Stars and Strips labeled it “the Y.M.C.A.’s pugilistic emporium.”Footnote ³⁴

The war heightened popular and protestant interest in health and manliness. When the war ended, the YMCA's boxing program did not. Far from it. With a trained army at its fingertips, Muscular Christianity was, in many ways, emboldened by the war and by its aftermath. Boxing was the medium for the message of bodily perfectibility, godly affect, and racial salvation. YMCA boxing productions reached even greater heights during demobilization. Inspired, legitimized, and enlisted as a racialized remedy to white softness, boxing sprang out of the trenches for even more to see, for all to learn about its manly virtues, to feel the pain, and to reap its Christian benefits.Footnote ³⁵

General Orders No. 241, the Inter-Allied Games, and the New Violent Sportsman

After “the strenuous game of beating the Hun” was won, in the words of athletic director Elwood Brown, more games were in order. In the continued service of advancing white manhood, the YMCA doubled down on its sporty mission in winter 1918–1919 and brought even more athletics to its overcivilized regiments. With its “two-fisted, business-like, get-it-done service,” read the Christian Register in October 1919, the YMCA took care of things. Major General Hunter Liggett reported that 79.5 percent of the entire First Army actively participated in athletics in the last two weeks of February 1919; reports from combat troops as a whole exceeded that figure. “From Bordeaux to Coblenz, the Doughboy and the officer played,” read an official AEF report. “[H]e played fair, he played hard, and he played everything.” The YMCA-military found domestic application for sports during demobilization as easily as it had found lethal application for sports during war. The idea was “to keep men as ‘fit for home’ as they were fit to fight.”Footnote ³⁶

That the YMCA freely contributed its services to a world at war for more than a year was exemplary, but the passing of General Orders (GO) No. 241 on December 29, 1918, finally allotted the organization official dues. Government funds in the amount of $2.5 million went to purchase athletic supplies and to prepare athletic leaders to ensure that demobilized soldiers and the army of occupation in Germany were kept fit. GO No. 241 established a complete physical program and further formalized the joint efforts of the Y and the military. It was a massive effort. A report from the American Expeditionary Forces stated that GO No. 241 would “go down as the biggest boost American sports and athletics ever received from any source whatsoever. It wrote athletics into a military order. It prescribed them as a war measure.” This was sport on a scale that dwarfed any previous playtime. Just seven months after the order, from January to July 1919, almost twenty-nine million soldiers participated in the AEF and the YMCA physical training program. It was patriotism, health, manliness, and clean play for all—or, at least, for those favored by the Jim Crow army. Truly, read one account, the “American Army became a playing as well as a fighting army.”Footnote ³⁷

This playing army played most vigorously, most competitively, in the Inter-Allied Games in Paris, France, from June 22 to July 6, 1919. The brainchild of YMCA athletic director Elwood Brown, the fifteen-day contest was an “international” affair modeled after the modern Olympics, wherein nations displayed their finest physical specimens.Footnote ³⁸ As a gift to France, the YMCA built Pershing Stadium to house the spectacle. Named after the commander of the AEF, Pershing Stadium averaged twenty thousand in daily attendance during the Games. Fifteen hundred elite athletes from eighteen nations or dominions participated in twenty-four separate events. Participants from the Central Powers were not invited. By design, however, it was a multicultural orgy of sportsmanship as the Games mobilized the demobilized armies for athletic contest. If soldiers were enlisted, or so the rules read, they could play. In the pregame championships between January and May, more than twenty-eight million Allied soldiers participated, and more than twenty-nine million watched. It was a newly popularized, government-funded social space for competition and aggression that was not war. White American soldiers did well, winning gold medals in shooting events, baseball, basketball, boxing, prize jumping with horses, swimming, tug-of-war, and wrestling. AEF chaplain F. C. Thompson even won the hand-grenade throwing contest, setting a new world record at 245 feet and 11 inches. So widespread was the athletic fervor, touted the Games Committee, that “the Paris newspapers devoted more space to games than to the Peace Conference.”Footnote ³⁹

Athletic prowess aside, the Inter-Allied Games were an unabashed celebration of democracy in the new world order. Aligned with President Wilson's League of Nations and a Christian “brotherhood of man,” the Games freely commingled the like virtues of American statecraft and human playfulness. As the Chief Secretary of the American Expeditionary Forces’ YMCA told the audience of ninety thousand in his speech at the opening ceremonies:

So prominent was the application of sports for the Great War that one of the first monuments erected to memorialize the conflict was an arena. Before Americans mourned the dead at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, they celebrated life at Pershing Stadium. Public figures and soldiers together conflated freedom, pluralism, and athletics. Sports were a natural, universal birthright, the self-evident mark of an independent people. In democracy and sports, all were born equal. In democracy and sports, all were free. In democracy and sports, all fraternized accordingly. Such was the inclusive tone of the Games Committee.

The inclusive reality of the Games, however, was a different story. Player-fighters called the YMCA's Inter-Allied Hut “the melting pot,” but there was a separate hut for the “Composite Regiment.” Sammons and Morrow show that “facilities for black soldiers were wanting in size, comfort, supplies, programs, and staff,” and so black soldiers had little opportunity to embody the player-fighter ideal. The place of African Americans in the Games was negligible by design. Stateside sports were almost entirely segregated at the time. I find no record of separate leagues for African-American soldiers in the Games, however, and the official Game publications reference only one African-American competitor, Solomon Butler, who competed in the long jump. In a new world order where athletics were a largely white cure for white overcivility, the place of African Americans was complicated, if not doubtful. As corresponding meritocracies, democracy and sports were special spaces for the expression of separate and unequal natural rights and natural law. Sports were not just activities but also a foundational principle in the making of a world no longer at war. Like American democracy, sports were for everyone, but particularly for white men. One observer reported that “the true American contribution” was the “raised mental and moral standards through encouragement of physical soundness.” The segregated YMCA made it so.Footnote ⁴¹

Boxing appealed to a great many of the white player-fighters as they were animated by the merits of patriotism and aggression. Boxing was the structure that provided meaning, shaped experience, and privileged and sanctioned violence in war and in peace. With boxing spectators composing nearly 20 percent of the entire game audience, in the words of the Games Committee, “the results achieved in boxing were particularly gratifying.” Indeed, the Inter-Allied Games Committee claimed that, within the YMCA's conspicuous model ring at Pershing Stadium, “cleaner sportsmanship will never be seen.” From death-trench to clean ring, the sport engendered an ambiguity. Differing from the customary Queensbury Rules, the AEF rules for boxing disqualified contestants for any use of “abusive or insulting language.” As a game for white civilization, boxing had to express a refined form of savagery. The YMCA drastically shifted, sublimating the application of the sweet science from the barbed wire fences to the ring ropes. Potential for death had to be potential for character. “Digger” Evans of Australia, for one, was an exemplary figure. “His good-natured sportsmanship, his winning and cheerful smile,” the Committee said, “made him a decided favorite with the ring-side fans of all nations.” Eddie Eagan, a twenty-one-year-old Yale student, national amateur heavyweight champion, Inter-Allied middleweight champion, and Y man, was promoted as an archetype. “He has lived a clean, vigorous life,” Association Men assured it readers, as the “wonder of his bodily development” made clear. “His great chest bellows out as he breathes. His waistline is supple as a dancer's.” Eagan's clean living was corporealized. He was animated by selfless patriotism and sporty aggression. “I received no compensation in any form for the time I devoted to fighting for my country with my fists,” claimed Eagan. General Pershing, who awarded Eagan's medal at the conclusion of the Games, was certainly a fan. Pershing was “the most enthusiastic booster of boxing in the world today,” claimed Jimmy Bronson, the athletic director for the YMCA in France. “This game of yours is a game that made the American army the greatest in the world,” Pershing told Bob Martin after he won the Inter-Allied heavyweight championship. “Go back home, Bob, live clean, think clean, box daily and you'll succeed.” If Allied victory was not a self-evident testament to Allied moral and physical superiority, the Allied games were an outright proclamation, and boxing was the medium for the message.Footnote ⁴²

With a readership of well over half a million, the AEF newspaper Stars and Stripes joined the YMCA-military's push for pugilism and increased its coverage of boxing in December 1918.Footnote ⁴³ The paper critically reported on high prices in YMCA canteens and was often critical of the organization, but Stars and Stripes was a helpful advocate in the propaganda for peacetime prizefighting.Footnote ⁴⁴ Perhaps not coincidentally, as Jonathan Ebel shows, the paper often gave bad press to African Americans.Footnote ⁴⁵ Alongside the YMCA, Stars and Stripes was an advocate in the racial project of boxing promotion. Although the paper's previous coverage had lamented the sport's legal troubles back home, by 1919, the tone had changed. “Boxing Commission Planned for U.S.,” soldiers read in January, as “contests in AEF give new impetus to fistic sport in states.” The so-called “Army, Navy, and Civilian Boxing Board,” backed by William Taft, General Leonard Wood, Provost General Crowder, and others, would “elevate the game in the states.”Footnote ⁴⁶ As player-fighters who were now good with their hands put those hands to work in the ring, Stars and Stripes was there for reportage. Under the auspices of the Y, Stars and Stripes reported, “Yanks Don Mitts across the Rhine” at the Fest Halle in Coblenz every Saturday night.Footnote ⁴⁷ Under the auspices of the Y, the paper's headline read, “Bouts Draw Big Holiday Crowd” at the New Year's Eve carnival in Nevers, France.Footnote ⁴⁸ In February, the same month that the YMCA opened its “pugilistic emporium” at the Cirque de Paris, two AEF chaplains were “to lay down bibles for boxing gloves” in a ten-round bout. Earl “Fighting Parson” Blackman of the 130th Field Artillery, 35th Division publically challenged “any parson in the AEF of 160 pounds weight or over” to meet him in the squared circle.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Reverend Charles Rexrode of the 316th MP 91st Division accepted. Overpriced YMCA cigarettes and chocolate aside, boxing was the topic du jour for Stars and Stripes. It had to be. Boxing is what the soldiers wanted. Boxing is what the soldiers did. Boxers are what the soldiers became.

By religious and governmental design, the American army of occupation in Germany consisted of a peppy, pugnacious lot. One observer described them thus:

This bunch was eager for a reason. The YMCA simultaneously created a desire and satiated it. The trenches may have been the ultimate providence of the military, but the ring was the providence of the Y. This was made clear in the A.F. in G. Athletic Hand Book—both the 1919–1920 and the 1920–1921 editions—which was published by the American YMCA. For the American Forces in Germany, boxing was the exclusive subject of nearly half of the sixty-page booklet.Footnote ⁵¹ The handbook editors initially planned the booklet to include records of men who fought five or more times, they claimed, but this would have been another book-sized project. Numerous Y boxing shows occurred throughout the entire army of occupation in any given week. The Y's Saturday night boxing shows at Liberty Hut in Coblenz, for instance, drew more than three thousand soldier-spectators. “Ever since the Americans have been on the Rhine,” read one account, the Y had staged international boxing shows on July 4, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. In the 1920–1921 fiscal year alone, the Y's athletic handbook recorded a total of 340,508 in attendance at YMCA boxing shows. The records were detailed. That made for 278 shows, 1,533 bouts, 7,290 rounds, and 8,702 boxers. Outside of the official YMCA shows, however, there were more. To make it into the Y's pugilistic entertainment program, 38,218 practiced boxing and the Y gave lessons to 12,400 prospective boxers. Taken to boxing promotion, the YMCA had a sizable stable of fighters. It even furnished fight purses for all boxing bouts in the occupied area. If the Y didn't make a man a fighter, then it certainly made a man a fight fan. “From the number of people entertained by boxing,” read the handbook, “this sport seems to take the lead.”Footnote ⁵²

The YMCA's bimonthly Athletic Bulletin, published for the American Forces in Germany (A.F. in G.), made sure player-fighters knew how to fight and how to be entertained by fighting. Particularly with “the weekly Y fight show,” it read, “boxing has been the most popular sport with the Americans here.” Accordingly, boxing coverage in the Athletic Bulletin was extensive and constant. It was a celebration of the art that supposedly helped win the war and a reaffirmation of the good character that boxing produced. YMCA productions were everywhere. “Compound Boxing Shows Are Making a Big Hit,” read the front-page headline of the first issue on November 1, 1920. The 8th Infantry was “chuck full of boxers.” The Y put on bouts of the “slam bang variety.” News of boxing tournaments abounded—“Pugilistic Patter,” in the words of one headline. In a period spanning just over six months, one article calculated, the Y put on 79 shows, 410 bouts, and 1,914 rounds with 2,811 boxers and 77,448 spectators. Thirty of those shows were at the Coblenz Y Liberty Hut. If a soldier did not respond to the ads soliciting player-fighters for tournaments, then a soldier could learn how to make “a substantial punching bag platform” with detailed instruction and graphics. Soldiers read pointers from a promoter, who advised, “Remember you are an American and a gentleman, and further, you are a member of the brotherhood of goodsports through your association with the ring. … Make, and keep the ring game clean.” White player-fighters were brothers in the war and brothers in the ring. The Athletic Bulletin heaped praise on exemplary pugs. “Huggins has always shown that he has class,” it read, as “he is the type of boxer that puts everything he has into his work and is one of the cleanest boxers who has ever appeared in the American Forces.” White AEF boxing instructor and world featherweight champion Johnny Kilbane, too, was “a classy mittman.” From brutality to civility, the “faults” of the old prize ring were a thing of the past, soldiers learned. Thanks to the YMCA-military efforts, the sins of pugilism past were expunged as “nations which were formerly opposed to the sport are now encouraging it as the World War brought the nations together.” Indeed, “Boxing Rules Have Undergone a Great Many Changes Since the Olden Days,” read one headline. The YMCA's periodical whitewashed its boxing history lesson for soldiers. As opposed to the pugilism of yesteryear, Allied boxing was good-natured. Allied trenches were necessary. The Allied ring was morally tidy and boxing was here to stay. “Boxing lives,” read one article,

Appealing to initiates in the “cults of inner experience,” to borrow a phrase from Jackson Lears, boxing was the poster boy for antimodern morality.Footnote ⁵⁴ Boxing was suitable for all—particularly for those who had forgotten their primal past—because boxing had always been. Boxing became a white memory, a memory that should never again be ignored. Boxing taught white participants and audiences the goodness of their red-fanged desires as it made those desires. After player-fighters harmed the Huns, they wrapped their fists in five ounces of horsehair and leather and harmed themselves for the sake of authenticity and sportsmanship. Returning to the repressed, boxing, formerly deadly, was now as clean as it gets. The Y reformed the trenches to make fighters and fans. Thus informed, player-fighters went home.

All the Rage Back Home

“Boxing Near Its Death?” queried the Kansas City Star in March 1917, just before the end of Wilsonian neutrality. Dubious promoters and unsavory fighters had “ruined the game.” In the mud and the blood, however, the Y salvaged the morally questionable and legally marginal practice; it took a hearty dose of patriotic fervor, antimodern belief, and Christian sanction to do so. Five years later, in 1922, the New York Times declared, “Boxing Is on High Plane.” Thanks to recently improved and multiplied state regulations governing boxing, the sport is on “a high plane of sportsmanship.” Having saved the world through its martial application, entertained the demobilized millions through its competitive use, and aggressively reformed its white player-fighters, boxing came home as a Christian-decorated war hero. As the Inter-Allied Games Committee suggested, “The fact that hundreds of officers have received practical experience in managing bouts in the AEF, and are returning to civil life as warm supporters of boxing, will elevate the sport and insure to it an established position.” Thus, after the war, because of the war, and as a result of the Y, a “Golden Age” of boxing in America began. Instilling Christian character through mass practice, the YMCA's wartime boxing program worked not only on Allied soldiers but also on the American public writ large. Antimodern notions of boxing's “clean” and “deadly” effects resonated in untold corners, reached untold numbers, and created untold subjects in the immediate decade and later.Footnote ⁵⁵

To be sure, boxing certainly had its place in American culture before the war: the working-class underground, particularly in the urban northeast. Elliot Gorn, a historian of nineteenth-century prizefighting, suggests that, before WWI, the “values, social relationships, and culture” of boxing were largely about lawlessness, immorality, and manhood gone wrong. Thanks to an “evangelical crusade” that predominated nineteenth-century social mores and public policy, Gorn writes, boxing was “swept aside” in this far-reaching “cultural ethos.” Besmirched by protestant social reformers as the unsavory practice of an unscrupulous lot, boxing was for those who lacked character. In Gorn's words:

Prior to the war, boxing was the enemy of social reform, not the solution to it. Critics decried boxing as the providence of gamblers, bullies, pickpockets, and thieves. Anthony Comstock was certainly opposed. Harry Hill's saloon in New York City was a key sporting center in 1870s and 1880s America. It was also “the most dangerous and demoralizing” place in the city, according to one unnamed critic, and the “resort of a low class of prostitutes, and of the ruffians and idlers who support the prize ring.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Boxing was not only for criminals, boxers were criminals. Moral-minded legislatures instituted a range of laws and statutes across the country to prosecute prizefighters in the middle and late 1800s. As one legal history scholar points out, the birth of movie censorship in the late nineteenth century was the outcome of anti–prizefighting film crusades rather than concern over sexually “immoral or obscene” films.Footnote ⁵⁸ If not banned outright, then boxing was in great need of moral and other reform. The introduction of gloves ostensibly helped to “civilize” the sport, and the turn-of-the-century move to systematize the game by adding weight classifications, referees, and limited rounds helped its public image. The war and the YMCA, however, ultimately provided the practical application and the theological endorsement that the sport needed. “Pugilism's triumph in the 1920s,” Gorn writes, was forthcoming because “the old sporting fraternity that had lived beyond the pale of respectable society—became fans.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Pugilism most certainly triumphed in the 1920s as the brutal lawlessness of old became a primal expression of the contemporary good.Footnote ⁶⁰

In the 1920s, as many scholars note, boxing caught on like never before.Footnote ⁶¹ Legally, culturally, and economically, boxing was in. The boxing campaign put on by the YMCA and the U.S. military on foreign shores, by design, influenced stateside jurisprudence.Footnote ⁶² Lobbyists whispered in open ears; politicians found favor; judges discovered new sympathy; bills were passed; governing bodies and boxing commissions were formed. Boxing was, thus, mainstreamed as a spectator sport. Boxing was big business and local economies and promoters capitalized. The “Million Dollar Fight”—1.7 million, actually—between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in July 1921 broke gate receipt records. To keep fans informed, the Ring magazine began circulation the following year. The war “definitely established boxing on the map,” read a September 1925 article. Nearly one World War later, the “value of boxing” was still “inestimable,” proclaimed the Ring in May 1941, as it “develops character and personality.”Footnote ⁶³ The readership was there, and so was the spectatorship. In 1925, boxing promoter Tex Rickard built Madison Square Garden to keep fans in seats. The arena was an homage. Boxers were superstars. Superstars were boxers. Wallace Beery won an Academy Award in 1931 for his starring role in The Champ, in which he played a wayward alcoholic and compulsive gambler who finds moral salvation through boxing. Boxing movies were a burgeoning industry and professional boxing was fodder.Footnote ⁶⁴ Amateur boxing was the cat's pajamas as lay boxers around the country tested their knowledge of the sweet science in a newly formed competition called the Golden Gloves Championships (founded in 1926). College students were in on it. During this “boom in boxing,” reported the New York Times in 1920, boxing as an intercollegiate sport was “rapidly gaining supporters at a number of colleges and universities in all parts of the country.” Doctors began to amass an ever-growing pool of data on instances of gloved fists striking skulls, and, by 1928, “punch drunk syndrome” was a medical diagnosis. Previously hidden in the trenches, this violence was publically staged and arranged for all to see and do. With new legal sanction, Americans bludgeoned one another and watched one another be bludgeoned in the name of good sportsmanship, athletic prowess, and the newly emboldened and civilianized virtue of physical aggression.Footnote ⁶⁵

The newly sanctioned sport of boxing allowed that which was previously sublimated to be enacted outright. Antimodern fans flocked to see humans be humans and learn the ancient lessons. The popularized sport of boxing undid American overcivilization, established a new society, and kept Jackson Lear's “cults of inner experience” entertained and exercised all the while. Even women admired boxing.Footnote ⁶⁶ Sitting ringside at the 1926 fight between heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and challenger (and WWI veteran) Gene Tunney, Katharine Fullerton Gerould was pulled “authentically back through time” as the “spirit of the scene was a very ancient one.” Indeed, she noted, the marvelously brutish “Manassa Mauler,” Jack Dempsey, was “created, fashioned to be that, in its perfection; it was the original purpose of him from the beginning of the world.” For Gerould, Dempsey was a numen inest, that is, the embodiment of an ancient god within. Boxing brought forth the holy. Of the record-breaking one hundred and twenty thousand or so spectators, Gerould noted, nowhere to be found were pickpockets, drunkards, and gamblers. Affixed by the ancient reverie before them, the “manners, the quietness, the considerateness, the general decorum” of the crowd were all the result of “the quality of the interest that dominated them.” Inverting nineteenth-century protestant sentiment, boxing was no longer for those who lacked character, class, or civility. The “clean” ring of the AEF was an archetype that allowed for a larger audience. Boxing did not jeopardize those who beheld it. Watching boxing allowed them to become who they truly were. After 1920, notes boxing historian Kasia Boddy, “it became increasingly fashionable for women to attend boxing matches.” As a God-given expression, then, it was only natural that women would appreciate the natural display. “It's no longer enough to have speed and a good right arm to be the favorite,” said Jack Dempsey. “You have to be good-looking, too, now that the ladies go to the fights.” From loin to fist, the reverie of the squared circle evoked primal urges in women and men alike. For the overcivilized masses, boxing was a moral awakening of the slumbering id.Footnote ⁶⁷

Amid the pugilistic appreciation, religious leaders and institutions echoed the YMCA's wartime logic and replicated the character-building boxing programs at home. Devotion for the sweet science circulated widely. “The man who denies the lure of a conflict is in some respects lacking,” Dean Charles R. Brown of Yale Divinity School told the students in May 1920. “Don't suppress your fighting instinct—guide it.” The man who turns cheek in a scrap is hardly a man at all. When Senator Walker of New York attempted to pass a pro-boxing bill that same month, the senator offered a list of nine hundred names of “clergymen of all denominations who favored the bill,” twenty-five of whom were in attendance; more than fifty had written the senator, seeking a chance to speak in support of the bill.Footnote ⁶⁸ With many propugilist pulpits, churches even housed boxing exhibitions.Footnote ⁶⁹ Wheaton College, too, shared in the new national love. When Billy Sunday's “ex-prize fighter trainer and body guard,” John “Doc” Cardiff, joined the faculty in 1936, Doc's public testimony and job talk, “From Prize Ring to Pulpit,” was a stimulus. His story tapped into the sentiments around boxing. “More than a quarter of a century ago a young man sat in an evangelistic service fighting a battle—a mental and spiritual battle,” read The Wheaton Record. The article continued,

Like so many in the brotherhood of good sportsmanship before him, Doc's mighty fists were mighty fists for the Lord. Wheaton students thirsted for knowledge of this ring-craft. “A new interest in boxing has developed,” read the Wheaton Record in October 1939. Students wanted a boxing course. Cardiff was asked to teach it. People may “think of boxing as a cruel, bloody, barbarous sport,” the Wheaton Record advised, but Doc “recommends this sport as a perfect body and character builder.” Doc Cardiff's sparring partner, Billy Sunday, agreed. “Every boy should be taught to box,” said the Reverend, for “boxing makes a fellow courageous, makes him self-dependent.” As with all effective instruction, it was best to start early. American youths were the pedagogical target of this simultaneously savage and character-building sport.Footnote ⁷⁰

The Boy Scouts of America took up the virtuously violent cause with verve. Its publication, Boys’ Life, flat-out campaigned. The monthly magazine taught children how to be good children and fight like their fathers. The morally upright boxer who succeeded by virtue of his virtue was a commonplace canonical figure in the tales of boxing interwoven therein. Boxing was what made men morally upright and boys should aspire to that morality. “Have You a ‘Fighting Heart’?” challenged one article in April 1933, for a fighting heart helps “outside the ring as well as in.” Boys’ Life taught its young readership how to embrace their inner selves, how to let boxing speak to their hearts, and how to develop good Christian aggression. “Boxing is the oldest form of physical competition known,” read another article; our “prehistoric ancestors were brave if brutal,” it said, for they readily employed “nature's weapons—their hands.” Boxing was a lost practice that needed restoration. Nowadays, fortunately “free from brutality,” boxing “happens to be one of the finest and most useful exercises that a boy can take up” so as to cultivate the “high quality of mastering himself.” Because technique was essential to learning nature's weapons and achieving self-mastery, the article came with illustrated instructions. Seeking to cure any outwardly cowardice affect, Boys’ Life author C. Ward Crampton looked to heavyweight champion and WWI veteran Gene Tunney. “Courage is a matter of the will,” said Tunney, “and will-power can be developed just as a muscle can be developed, even though it is a spiritual quality.” Fear was not just a soldierly problem; fear was also a civilian malady. To better train those young fighter hearts, Dr. Crampton advised a series of exercises to cure the epidemic boy problem of “flinching.” Like the player-fighters before them, good Christian boys could not be good if yellow. Dr. Crampton also addressed how to handle bullies. “To be a man is to be a fighter,” Dr. Crampton advised, so the more a boy boxed, the more a boy resisted the bully, the more positive manly qualities became “assimilated with his life forces.” To open hearts, to converted aggressive souls, Boy Scout boxing was a duty to God, to country, and to the pugnacious but moral inner self.Footnote ⁷¹

From training young men at war to teaching young men and boys at home, the YMCA again set to it. Graham Curry was one such advocate in his 1924 thesis, “The Place of Amateur Boxing in the Young Men's Christian Association.” The recent war, he wrote, made evident “that the sport had virtue.” With questionnaires filled out by and interviews with several YMCA physical directors, gym owners, and boxers, Curry conveyed the code of the times in elaborate detail. Indeed, “be proud of your black eye,” he wrote, for such fistic activities encouraged “the individual to create clean habits for himself, and tends to produce a cleanness in sport that elevates his entire moral life.” The outward physical traumas of a boxer were the inward marks of a fortified Christian. Cauliflower ear was legible virtue. The aggression that boxing instilled was good aggression. Surely, boxing did not develop bullies, Curry insisted, but, rather, cultivated those coveted qualities of self-control, confidence, and that old “fighting spirit.” Virtue gained was its own reward, and unscrupulousness was its own punishment. The dubious pug “Terrible Terry” McGovern, Curry cautioned, “ended up in a sanitarium—broke.” The upright YMCA was well positioned to harness the new social energies around this new upright social sport. “The Young Men's Christian Association naturally has a greater opportunity of utilizing good effects from the crowd than other organizations,” wrote Curry. The Y ought to guide as it did during the war. YMCA physical directors should even be referees so that they might “encourage politeness, good feeling, and good sportsmanship as criterions of the ring etiquette.” Good, clean fighting was obviously what the people wanted, or so Curry thought. He wrote of the new violent sentimentalism: “To see two little fellows leave the ring with their arms around each other in a spirit of camaraderie after having fiercely battled only a few minutes before, having tried honestly to inflict all the punishment they possibly could on their opponent, is a sight which brings tears to the eyes of many spectators.” Fighting hearts everywhere would be touched. Boxing was beautiful. To box was to enact a state of nature. Curry pleaded, “The natural man has been suddenly thrown into an unnatural physical state by an ultra civilization. Something must be done to preserve the health of the race. Something must be substituted.” There was a danger to peacetime. The Great War was an outlet, a cure, a revelation. Boxing solved the postwar problem of peace and racial devolution. Curry wanted physical destruction for physical recreation for the civilian world, too, and so did others.Footnote ⁷²

The YMCA extended its boxing curriculum well after and beyond the war. A stateside meeting of more than eighty-five physical directors from around the country in December 1918 concluded that young men cared less for the Y's “light games” than for the proliferating sweet science. The opinion of the directors, reported the Chicago Tribune, was that “the war has proved that young men and boys want more strenuous sport.” Said one director, “the results [of wartime boxing] were evident. The men forgot the meaning of the word fear and gained self-confidence which every boy and young man in the Y.M.C.A. should have.” To accommodate the aggressive instinct it had, in fact, created, the Y needed a hard sport for hard men. Now that boxing was “legal in nearly every state in the Union,” read a 1922 edition of Physical Training, “organizations which, before the war, would have held up their hands at the very mention of this sport are now promoting it with might and main.”Footnote ⁷³

The monthly YMCA magazine, Association Men, immediately capitalized on the punchy postwar trend. In a January 1920 article, “Boxing Gloves and Bibles,” one author wrote of the “blended piety and fun” at his YMCA, where “the day of denominational ardor (thank God!) is waning” and a “cooperating spirit” prevailed. Much as in the war, religious ecumenism occurred at the level of boxing. “We saved our money to buy boxing gloves and Bibles,” the author said, “and handled them both and handled men with them.” Boxing spoke to all. A November 1921 article, “Handling Son with Gloves,” advocated similarly. “It's a good thing to handle the boy with gloves,” it read awkwardly, “but use the right gloves; the gloves of manly give-and-take and combat, and sportsmanly good-fellowship.” By the early 1920s, glove handling was a clear path to Christian manhood in the civilian world. The YMCA formed a committee on boxing so as to “meet the demand of the day.” The YMCA publication Physical Training immediately aired advice on how to manage boxing in YMCAs, as there was a “natural desire in most men to see a good scrap.” Physical directors at YMCAs across the country struggled to “meet the increasing demands for boxing instruction.” YMCA-published advice on the subject was abundant. Hit the “most vulnerable” parts, so it went, like the side of the chin, under the ear, the back of the neck, over the heart, or the liver. Such pugnacity was sponsored in YMCA boxing tournaments across the country. There was even talk of a national tournament. “If the Y can put boxing on a high plane and put this sport in the same category as handball and volleyball, why not try?” wrote one Washington YMCA physical director in the mid-1940s. Boxing provided “a fine opportunity to develop the characteristics of aggressiveness, courage, sportsmanship and gentlemanliness,” wrote a Kansas YMCA physical director. He continued, for “shy and backward” boys, boxing made a “change in the total personalities.” Fear not, however, “for every boy who participated in amateur boxing and received brain injuries,” one character educator assured his readers, “I venture to say a thousand better men were developed because of their having boxed.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Writing in 1933, sociologist Jesse Frederick Steiner took note of what later sport historians would come to partially realize. Steiner wrote, “Popular interest in boxing was considerably stimulated during the World War by its adoption in training camps as a sport well suited for the development of skill and hardihood among the soldiers.” He apprehended in a single sentence a fundamental point of this article, although I clarify that the YMCA made it so. Steiner added that “during the decade following the War boxing entered upon a period of growing popularity.” Whereas average gate receipts at the “best patronized bouts” between 1901 and 1910 amounted to less than $60,000, gate receipts between 1921 and 1930 averaged more than $1 million at each bout. Echoing wartime boxing promotions, Steiner explained the popularity of boxing as a public “fascination” with “bodily combat with serious risks of physical injury.” He continued, “some of the most popular boxers have been sluggers capable of giving and taking a large amount of punishment.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The blood let by the war may have soured some, as Clifford Putney suggests.Footnote ⁷⁶ The blood let by boxing, however, continued to excite the ancient memories of a population well educated in their own repression, well aware of the things they were not supposed to do, and well versed in the presumption of their own bodily design.