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Puritanicalism, sport, and race: a symbolic crusade of 1911

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Stuart Mews*
Affiliation:
University of Lancaster

Extract

Race and recreation are two contemporary social problems which historically have had a close connection with religion. Religion has both sanctioned racial discrimination and provided the inspiration to overcome it. It has both opposed and encouraged particular forms of popular recreation. Sociologists and social historians are increasingly investigating the various combinations of these 3 Rs - religion, race, recreation. A great deal of work has been done on the relations between religion and race, quite a lot on race and recreation, especially in the form of sport, and a beginning has been made on religion and recreation. To my knowledge, no attempt has yet been made to bring these three elements together.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1972

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References

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page no 304 note 1 By ‘puritanicalism’ is meant the narrow and negative aspect of nineteenth century Puritanism.

page no 304 note 2 This aspect of the paper is offered in response to, and in agreement with, the call by Winthrop S. Hudson for a more comparative treatment of church history: ‘ How American Is Religion in America?’ in Brauer, pp 155ff.

page no 305 note 1 Meier, [August], [Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915. Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington] (Ann Arbor 1963) pp 161-5Google Scholar; Myrdal, [Gunnar], [An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modem Democracy] (New York, 20th Anniversary Edition, 1962) p 452 Google Scholar.

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page no 306 note 1 The Times, 4 July 1911, p 4.

page no 306 note 2 Farr, [Finis], [Black Champion. The Life and Times of Jack Johnson] (London 1964) pp 72, 53 Google Scholar.

page no 306 note 3 Johnson, James Weldon, Black Manhattan (New York 1969) p 66.Google Scholar

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page no 307 note 1 Veblen, [Thorstein], [The Theory of the Leisure Class] (New York, The Modern Library, 1961; first edition 1899)Google Scholar.

page no 307 note 2 A similar conflict in an English context is worked out by Maclntyre, Alasdair in Secularization ana Moral Change (Oxford 1967) ch 2Google Scholar.

page no 307 note 3 N[ew] Y[ork] T[imes], 6 June 1910, p 9; Farr, pp 86-7.

page no 308 note 1 NYT, 16 June 1910, p 2.

page no 308 note 2 Ibid, Farr, pp 87-8. Three weeks later Bennett was announced as a candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor of New York. The NYT (7 July 1910, p 5) explained that his supporters in the Progressive wing of the party had high hopes of success, partly because as a result of his ‘zeal in having the Jeffries-Johnson fight banned from California, he will have behind him the church people and the moral sentiment vote’.

page no 308 note 3 NYT, 16 June 1910, p 2.

page no 308 note 4 Gusfield, p 97; Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York 1955) pp 7086 Google Scholar.

page no 308 note 5 Loy, John W. Jr, ‘The Nature of Sport: A Definitional Effort’, in Loy, [John W.] [Jr], and Kenyon, [Gerald S.], [Sport, Culture, and Society: A Reader on the Sociology of Sport] (London 1969) p 69 Google Scholar.

page no 309 note 1 Farr, p 106.

page no 309 note 2 NYT, 4 July 1910, p 14.

page no 309 note 3 For Ransom, see Meier, pp 159, 180, 185, 220-1, 229, 233; Ransom, Reverdy C., The Spirit of Freedom and Justice (Nashville 1926)Google Scholar.

page no 309 note 4 NYT, 6 June 1910, p 6.

page no 309 note 5 Farr, p 83. The notion that Johnson was the symbolic champion of the Negro race was repeatedly stressed by the Chicago Defender, the first highly successful crusading news-paper founded by and for Negroes. On the role of the Negro ‘glamour personality’, see Myrdal, pp 734-5.

page no 309 note 6 Farr, p 108.

page no 309 note 7 NYT, 5 July 1910, p 12.

page no 310 note 1 Farr, pp 77-8.

page no 310 note 2 [John P.] Davis, [‘The Negro in American Sport’], in Davis, John P., The American Negro Reference Book (New Jersey 1966) p 783 Google Scholar.

page no 310 note 3 Ibid, and NYT, 6 July 1910, p 3.

page no 310 note 4 NYT, 5 July 1910, p 18. For the place of the Fourth of July in the ritual calendar of what has been called the American civil religion, see Robert N. Bellah, ‘Civil Religion in America’, Daedalus (Winter 1967) pp 1-21.

page no 310 note 5 NYT, 6 July 1910, p 3. The London Times had also expressed disgust at the number of women at the ringside in Reno (5 July 1910, p 11). R. H. Gretton claimed that one of the reasons for the opposition to the Johnson-Wells fight in London was that English public opinion was revolted by ‘the invasion of such spectacles by women, who...were being accused, with their sports and their cigarette-smoking and slang and “ragging”, of aping men to a deplorable extent’. A Modern History of the English People 1910-1922 (London 1929) p 55.

page no 310 note 6 John Rickards Betts, ‘The Technological Revolution and the Rise of Sport, 1850-1900’ in Loy and Kenyon, p 161.

page no 311 note 1 For the link which Veblen saw in the YMCA and YPCE between the sporting temperament and religious zeal whereby ‘sporting activities come to do duty as a novitiate or a means of induction into that fuller unfolding of the life of spiritual status which is the privilege of the full communicant alone’, see Veblen, pp. 222-3.

page no 311 note 2 The possibility of rivalry between the minister and the promoter - two professional organisers of leisure-time activities - should also be noted. Parallels can be drawn between the mass, professionally organised sports of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as football and boxing, and the new mass, professionally organised religious revival campaigns of the same period, such as those associated with Charles Finney, D wight Moody, and Billy Sunday. Although this type of revivalism was a ‘performance’ before ‘spectators’ (Olmstead, p 456), there was always room for audience participation at the end. For American academic concern with the spectator at this time, see Howard, George Elliot, ‘Social Psychology of the Spectator’, American Journal of Sociology, XVIII (Chicago 1912) pp 3550 Google Scholar. For English concern, see W. T. Stead’s denunciation of professional sport: ‘Our young men do not play themselves, they look on while professionals play.’ The Revival in the West (London 1905) p 14.

page no 311 note 3 The Souls of White Folk’, Independent, 18 August 1910 - extract in [Meyer] Weinberg [(ed), Du Bois, W. E. B.. A Reader] (New York 1970) p 303 Google Scholar.

page no 311 note 4 NYT, 6 July 1910, p 3.

page no 311 note 5 The Tintes, 7 July 1910, p 4.

page no 311 note 6 Ibid, 8 July 1910, p 5.

page no 312 note 1 Ibid, 12 July 1910, p 11.

page no 312 note 2 Ibid.

page no 312 note 3 Ibid.

page no 312 note 4 Ibid, 14 September 1911, p 4.

page no 312 note 5 Ibid, 15 July 1910, p 4, and 16 July 1910, p 4.

page no 313 note 1 Ibid, 14 September 1911, p 4.

page no 313 note 2 Glaser, John F., ‘English Nonconformity and the Decline of Liberalism’, American Historical Review, LXII, 2 (Jan. 1958) p 362 Google Scholar. As early as 1908, John Clifford was writing to Asquith: ‘It seems that one foremost need of the Liberal Party is the maintenance and increase of the enthusiasm of Free Churchmen...I fear that many of our Free Churchmen are losing heart.’ John Clifford to H. H. Asquith, 23 September 1908 (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Asquith 20/27).

page no 313 note 3 T. Phillips to D. Lloyd George, 18 September 1915 (Beaverbrook Library: Lloyd George Papers. D/20/2/21).

page no 313 note 4 See [Stuart] Mews, [Religion and English Society in the First World War] (Cambridge: forthcoming).

page no 314 note 1 For Law, see Jordan, E. K. H., Free Church Unity. History of the Free Church Council Movement 1896-1941 (London 1956) pp 136-8Google Scholar.

page no 314 note 2 Cadile, [J. C.], [My Life’s Little Day] (London 1935), p 178 Google Scholar; Rattenbury, J.Ernest, Evangelism and Pagan England (London 1954) p 34 Google Scholar.

page no 314 note 3 Fullcrton, [W. Y.], [F. B. Meyer. A Biography] (London n.d.) p 97 Google Scholar.

page no 315 note 1 Ibid.

page no 315 note 2 Carlile, p. 178. Even some Free Churchmen who were staunch Liberate objected to this identification: Gardiner, A. G., Life of George Cadbury (London 1923) pp 184-5Google Scholar.

page no 316 note 1 British Weekly, 24 August 1911, p 507. The Labour unrest of 1911 gave rise to many discussions about the attitude of the churches. Charles Brown, the Free Church president, believed that ‘the Church should openly ally itself’ with those demanding higher wages - a vew which met strong resistance: Spectator, 7 October 1911, pp 538-9.

page no 316 note 2 The Times, 19 September 1911, p 5. This act puzzled other Free Churchmen; Robertson Nicoll felt that the promoter should pay for his own mistakes: B[ritish] W[eekly], 21 September 1911, p 595.

page no 316 note 3 M[anchester] G[uardian,] 20 September 1911, p 4.

page no 317 note 1 Raymond Blathwayt in Great Thoughts, January 1904, quoted in Fullerton, p 173.

page no 317 note 2 Newsome, David, ‘The Assault on Mammon: Charles Gore and John Neville Figgis’, JEH, XVII, 2 (1966) pp 227-41Google Scholar. Figgis detected the growth of a ‘leisure class’ in Britain; he associated ‘paganisation’ with ‘the increase of riches and the Americanisation of society (by which I mean a world living apart from the sources of the money which the owners have nothing to do but spend).’ Religion and English Society (London 1910) p 31.

page no 317 note 3 Chester Mann, A., F. B. Meyer, Preacher, Teacher, Man of God (London 1929) p 81 Google Scholar.

page no 317 note 4 Ibid, p 82; for advcntism in the First World War, see Mews.

page no 318 note 1 BW, 26 January 1911, p 501.

page no 318 note 2 MG, 18 September 1911, p 8.

page no 318 note 3 These hopes were symbolically invested in Arthur Henderson, who described himself in Who’s Who in Methodism (London 1933) p 330, as a ‘Life-long abstainer and Temperance Reformer’. Three years later he was to be one of Meyers’ successors in the Presidency of the National Brotherhood movement. Will Thorne, with his dismissal of ‘slobby talk’, represented another moral tradition in the Labour Movement.

page no 319 note 1 Tom Brown’s Schooldays (London 1921 ed) pp 307-8, quoted in Newsome, David, Godliness and Good Learning (London 1961) p 213 Google Scholar. The whole of Part IV of this book on ‘Godliness and Manliness’ provides an excellent exposition of the growth of the cult of manliness in late Victorian England.

page no 319 note 2 Dawson, Lionel, Lonsdale. The Authorised Life of Hugh Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale, K.G., G.C.V.O. (London 1946) p 88 Google Scholar.

page no 319 note 3 Sutherland, Douglas, The Yellow Earl. The life of Hugh Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale, K.G., G.C.V.O. 1857-1944 (London 1965) p 173 Google Scholar.

page no 319 note 4 Ibid, p 176.

page no 320 note 1 On the Church’s attitude to the cinema, see Burnett, R. G. and Martell, E. D., The Devil’s Camera (London 1932)Google Scholar; Burnett, R.G., The Cinema for Christ (London 1934)Google Scholar; The Cinema: its Present Position and Future Possibilities (Repott of the National Council of Public Morals: London 1917).

page no 320 note 2 The Times, 16 September 1911, p 8.

page no 320 note 3 Ibid, 15 September 1911, p 6.

page no 321 note 1 Ibid.

page no 321 note 2 Ibid, 16 September 1911. p 8. One of the Manchester Guardian’s columnists received a letter expressing the hope that the Church of England would be involved in the controversy so that the Free Churches could not claim all the credit: MG, 21 September 1911, p 14.

page no 322 note 1 The Times, 16 September 1911, p 8.

page no 322 note 2 Ibid.

page no 322 note 3 Ibid, 18 September 1911, p 5.

page no 322 note 4 MG, 18 September 1911, p 8.

page no 322 note 5 This was one of Meyer’s favourite themes. Throughout his ministry he placed great emphasis on manliness in its widest sense, and admired strong men who were in complete control of their passions. To encourage the true masculine virtues, he frequently lectured to young men on ‘Personal Purity’ when ‘his topics were brutally frank; his maxims, warnings, and appeals deliberately crude to the point almost of coarseness’ (Fullerton, p 151). His biographer has remarked on the femininity of his character (Fullerton, p 76) and of his apparently successful attempts to be a ‘man’s man’ which gave the impression of a dual personality (p 111). Perhaps like John Morley, his contemporary in the political sphere, in whom the feminine virtues were also conspicuous, he was attracted by qualities opposite to his own: Hamer, D. A., John Morley. Liberal Intellectual in Politics (Oxford 1968) p 57 Google Scholar.

page no 323 note 1 To some extent his prayers were answered after the First World War when Johnson professed conversion. He appeared in the pulpit on several occasions, addressed methodist bishops on the virtues of self-control and the avoidance of liquor, and in 1924 addressed a Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan on sportsmanship, fair play, and the Golden Rule ! (Farr, p 228).

page no 323 note 2 The Times, 18 September 1911, p 5.

page no 323 note 3 Ibid, and Fullerton, p 121. Very probably one was booked by the only English clergyman who is known to have made friends with Johnson, Harold Davidson, who as Rector of Stiff key was to be defrocked in a blaze of publicity for his devotion to young ladies in teashops. A photograph of Johnson and Davidson taking tea in 1911 is to be found in Batchelor, Denzil, Jack Johnson and His Times (London 1956) p 128 Google Scholar.

page no 323 note 4 MG, 21 September 1911, p 14.

page no 323 note 5 The Times, 19 September 1911, p 5.

page no 324 note 1 Ibid.

page no 324 note 2 Davis, p 783.

page no 324 note 3 Farr, p 153. On the other hand, Washington’s rival for influence amongst negroes, W. E. B. Du Bois, supported Johnson at that time, see his article: ‘The Prize Fight’ Crisis (August 1914) included in Weinberg, pp 428-9.

page no 325 note 1 BW, 13 October 1910, p 42. Horton’s interest in the colour question was first aroused by conversations with negro students at Yale. Even thirty years later he could recall receiving ‘a shock on my first visit to America in 1893 from which I have never recovered’. The Mystical Quest of Christ (London 1923) p 145. For another comparison of the problems of religious and social integration, see Talcott Parson’s essay, ‘ Full Citizenship for the Negro American?’, reprinted as chapter 13 in his book, Sociological Theory and Modem Society (New York 1967).

page no 325 note 2 Peel, Albert and SirMarriott, John, Robert Forman Horton (London 1937) ch 6Google Scholar.

page no 326 note 1 Meier, p 183. However, not all Free Churchmen were as uncritical of Washington as Horton: Porritt, Arthur, The Best I Remember (London 1922) pp 194ffGoogle Scholar.

page no 326 note 2 The Times, 28 July 1911, p 8.

page no 326 note 3 For Durkheim, , see Essays on Sociology and Philosophy by Émile Durkheim et al. with appraisals of his life and thought, edited by Wolff, Kurt H. (New York 1960)Google Scholar. For Simmel, Sombart, and Vierkandt, see Aron, Raymond, German Sociology (New York 1964)Google Scholar.

page no 326 note 4 Spiller, Gustav (ed), Papers on Inter-Racial Problems Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress (London 1911) p 364 Google Scholar.

page no 327 note 1 The Times, 20 September 1911, p 4.

page no 327 note 2 Ibid.

page no 327 note 3 Ibid.

page no 328 note 1 Ibid, 21 September 1911, p 5.

page no 328 note 2 Ibid, 22 September 1911, p 6.

page no 328 note 3 Ibid, 25 September 1911, p 6.

page no 329 note 1 Ibid, 23 September 1911, p 5; and 24 September 1911, p 6.

page no 329 note 2 Ibid, 28 September 1911, p 7.

page no 329 note 3 This fact does not seem to have been noticed at the time, but see the welcome given to his appointment in BW, 6 October 1910, p 10.

page no 329 note 4 The Times, 27 September 1911, p 6.

page no 330 note 1 NYT, 29 September 1911, p 8.

page no 330 note 2 Fullerton, p 121.

page no 330 note 3 Ibid.

page no 330 note 4 The Times, 20 October 1911, p 10. I have found no evidence to support this charge. Meyer’s view was: ‘To the present generation of young Englishmen I certainly would never say a word to diminish any incentive to virile manhood. As far as I am concerned I say to all young men - By all means box, gentlemen, box; only 1) do your own boxing and not by proxy; 2) box for points and health and not for cash; 3) box the Devil and all his works’ (The Times, 22 September 1911, p 6).

page no 331 note 1 Hugh Price Hughes and the Nonconformist Conscience’, in Bennett, G. V. and Walsh, J. D. (eds), Essays in Modern English Church History (London 1966) p 182 Google Scholar.

page no 331 note 2 W. S. C. to C. S. C., 24 September 1911. quoted in Churchill, Randolph S., Winston S. Churchill, Companion Vol 11, Pt 2: 1907-11 (London 1969) p 1128 Google Scholar.