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Notes -
Steelman of two of Vivek’s points:
Americans have been obsessed with productivity for a long time. Search passages by the Founders for “industry” or “industrious” and you will find thousands of hits, often lauding the virtue of productivity. In the early 1900s we had scientific management, described in the 1940s book and movie Cheaper by the Dozen (about the 1920s). The movie is interesting for lauding both productivity and fertility.
Vivek is also right that we promote the wrong ideal in children. Our sports culture is ridiculous. Children shouldn’t look up to athletes and student athletes shouldn’t practice every day. This has no history in the first century of America, where a sport was enjoyed for its benefits and not as an end in itself. If you were a child in the 1800s you would look up to an historical hero, a national hero, or possibly some business titan. But not a sports player. Consumer sports obsession doesn’t even promote health, it discourages health by demotivating participation in local sports and encouraging sedentary activity.
This is a small number of participants who personally know each other. Conspire to price fix. Of course dad will suddenly refuse to honor this system. But at least it defeats his system.
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What about inducing young men to be regimented, putting the team in front of self, and creating situations to bond?
Seems to me the problem is local sports have devalued competition.
Does school not regiment them enough? It’s definitely important to learn teamwork and to bond, but you can do when everyone merely plays sports, without making it an obsession that requires 1000 hours of skill training. Have a sports competition every week and control each time for skill, so that each time has a nearly 50% chance of winning. This incentivizes the prosocial qualities, plus exercise, without all of the waste. And having guys organize these themselves is better than having a coach tyrannically dictate everything — I don’t think most training has enough downtime to truly bond, or allow enough argument to truly involve teamwork.
Random question about US history - when did US high school and college sport become driven by semi-professional spectator sport? In the British schools which take team sports seriously (now mostly the more trad private schools, admittedly) the core of "Games" was and still is ubiquitous intramural competition, with the unathletic kids expected and supported to participate at their level. And if there were enough pitches, an external match would include "B" and "C" teams so as many kids as possible could participate extramurally. But school matches normally happened on games afternoons when the people who were not playing would be competing intramurally - not spectating. Typically most of the spectators at a British school football game would be the parents of the players.
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Arguably not at all. A core component of regimentation is the idea of the regiment, IE being part of a larger whole.
Kids generally aren't trying to score higher on a test to bring the class' average up, they're doing it to bring their own average up.
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I dunno. Britain had a recognizable celebrity culture around boxing (see e.g. Pierce Egan's Boxiana) and cricket (Aubrey-Maturin, Flashman--by convention the only legitimately citable fiction) by 1805 or so. My initial reaction was to wonder whether the same thing was in the water supply in America, or whether instead this was an under-discussed difference between the two. Thinking about it some more, though, I reckon that this stuff is properly considered as adjacent to animal sports (a famous early boxer was even nicknamed the Game Chicken), which were surely popular in the colonies--Andrew Jackson bred racehorses and so forth. Which doesn't necessarily contradict your point.
That cricket was an enjoyed pastime and some man developed a reputation for being good is not the same as the sports-celebrity culture today. Boys can name twenty athletes at minimum, they watch most of the games of their favorite team, buy the jerseys and shoes, play FIFA (315 million* copies sold) or Madden (130 million copies sold), invest significant childhood time on competitive sports. I doubt middle class children in England grew up worshipping pugilists or cricket players.
And I mean, maybe pugilism was prosocial when your destiny as an illiterate lower class Englishman was to soldier overseas or die of malaria; it instills courage and desensitivity to pain. But that wasn’t the world of the other classes, and now we are all in these other classes.
Nothing I've said is a knock-down argument against your historical claim, but you're scarcely providing any argument for it either, just a lot of pointing and spluttering about "kids today" and bald assertions that it couldn't possibly have been so in days gone by (coupled with trivialities about modern mass media and so on). As a side note, projecting the modern concept of childhood back to a time when midshipmen were routinely commissioned at 13 is a chancy business.
At least in boxing, it was a good deal more than that. Champions dined with royals, drew aristocratic sinecures, and seem to have been household names (to the extent that any names were household names in a pre-mass-media era). John Gully, for one, became an MP. I recall references to news of prizefights and cricket matches being avidly sought after by East India Company men. All very recognizable.
"Significant" and "competitive" are rather weaselly words, but the aristocratic boarding schools certainly expected participation in their house games (Rugby football was officially codified in the 1830s and played for generations before that) and it doesn't seem to have been uncommon for aristocratic scions to play nationally competitive amateur cricket by at least the 1830s. Have you read Tom Brown's Schooldays? Well worth it for its own sake, and may shed some light on early 19th century British sporting culture. Hell, I'd recommend Boxiana as well, albeit perhaps as toilet reading due to its episodic nature.
I make no claims whatsoever about pro- or anti-sociality, to be clear.
I can’t offer any definitive proof that @coffee_enjoyer’s claim is correct, but as someone who spends a great deal of time dealing with 19th century American primary sources and who has read many autobiographies of men and women who grew up in that time, I’d say the lack of sports idols rings very true to me.
Newspapers were ubiquitous back then, serving not only as disseminators of news but also fulfilling the role that social media plays today. If you want to get a good sense of regular life during the 19th century, you can hardly do better than to just read 19th century newspapers. If you do, you’ll notice a striking absence of sports news. By the end of the century, a medium-sized newspaper might have a page or two per week devoted to their local sports teams’ games, but usually hardly more than that, while smaller papers didn’t even have that level of coverage. And if you read autobiographies of men and women who grew up in America in the early- to mid-19th centuries, you’ll typically find many references to playing sports, but few to no references to any sports idols.
This is in part because there weren’t any major sports leagues at that time. The first professional baseball team wasn’t founded until 1869, the first professional football players weren’t paid to play until 1892, and the first professional basketball league wasn’t founded until 1925.
All that said, while I think coffee_enjoyer is correct about the lack of sports heroes, I think he’s kind of wrong about young boys’ real heroes back in that day. Sure, they learned about great men of history and were taught to admire and emulate their virtues, but I don’t recall ever reading of a boy who had any real gripping, emotional connection to those men, as many boys do with sports superstars today. Instead, going by memoirs and autobiographies, most boys’ idols seem to have been older brothers, fathers, upperclassmen, teachers, fashionable young men around town, etc.
See, this is fairly compelling! Thanks.
Many of whom were at least locally distinguished in folk sports (e.g. wrestling), it seems to me, but this is of course quite different than modern spectator sport culture.
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