The Evolution of Sports in America

I'm Dave Oberg, Director of the Elmhurst History Museum, and today I'll be sharing with you more than just a game, the birth of organized sports in America. We're going to talk today about the 19th and 20th century origins of professional sports and sports culture here in the United States, and I just want to manage a few expectations here. This is going to be a brief program. I'm not going to cover every sport. We can't get to everything, and I should point out that really sports are as old as civilization. But what we're going to talk about, what emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is something new, both in the United States and around the world. For the most of human history, we played a variety of folk games with very loose rules that would vary geographically. What we're talking about in the 19th and early 20th century is the emergence of organized sports and sports culture that have standardized rules, standardized uniforms, bylaws, statistics, agreed upon equipment from coast to coast. And we're going to talk a little bit about why this happens, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of the overall presentation. So let's get started. What happens in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries is we go through a period of modernization, urbanization, and even a shift, really, in the way that we understand time. For most of human history, we observe what we call agricultural time. And in agricultural time, we kind of... blend leisure time with work very often. Think of quilting bees, husking bees. There isn't this formal, now it's time to work, now it's time to play, other than maybe a few festival days, saint's days, and those sorts of things. With industrialization, with urbanization, with more people living close together, and with a more linear division between leisure time and work time, suddenly we need a way to fill that leisure time a little bit. We also see in the really 18th and early 19th centuries and beyond revolutions in transportation and communication, those will continue well into the 19th century, the telegraph emerges, the telephone emerges, the steamship, the locomotive. Suddenly we're able to communicate over vast distances of space and we are actually able to travel to play the emerging games I'm going to talk about a little bit. to keep the statistics. And we have a highly literate culture as well that is growing up with our formal education system. And these folks want things to read about, and not strictly history, although that's always wonderful. We want to read about sports and how our teams are doing in this era as well. With industrialization and urbanization comes standardization. More people are packed together in closer spaces, and we're very precise on how we measure things. We have agreed upon weights and measures. We're timing things in our factories. And again, this idea of leisure time makes it easier to establish clubs and schedule games. And we want to be as precise with how we're playing those games and measuring those games as we are on the factory floor. So let's talk about some of the first individual and team sports that begin to emerge and set the board for our evolving sports culture. One of the first organized team competitions is held in 1824. on the Hudson, pitting the American rowing club called the White Haulers against a British crew of rowers. And this actually draws a crowd of 20,000 people with a $1,000 purse. So this is kind of a major event. So who knew that rowing is going to help set the stage for all of this? By the mid-1830s, there are 20 rowing clubs from Boston all the way down to Savannah along the eastern seaboard. By 1872... We actually see the creation of the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen with more than 200 clubs. We have standardized rules, standardized equipment, and bylaws. So again, we're using that precision from the factory floor for our emerging sports culture as well. A few years earlier, horse racing is going to help to set the stage a little bit too for the emergence of our sports culture. In 1821, New York legalizes competitive horse racing. leading to the creation of formal organizations that bring consistency to the rules, track conditions, and record keeping. And by 1842, the New York Jockey Club refines those rules and establishes a uniform as part of rule number 53, with a jockey cap, a colored jacket, pantaloons, and boots. Basically, we're seeing the creation of an actual sports uniform, something we're going to see happen again and again and again. sport that the common person can participate in. If you're going to go to a racing tournament, this could last three days. Horse flesh is very expensive. There's a reason we call this the sport of kings. And so this is not something that the average common person is going to see. By the way, you can see that jockey uniform emerging right there from a Harper's Weekly illustration. The more blue collar approach is harness racing. And here the owner and driver are the same. The horse has a day job as does the driver. These are largely trotters that are pulling a lot of the wagons around town. But we get the idea on the eastern seaboard of establishing these trotting clubs and races, harness races. The newer trotting club was established in 1824. It has its own standardized rules. The most famous racing horse of the era. is David Bryan's Lady Suffolk, who is nicknamed the Old Gray Mare and inspires the song we know today, The Old Gray Mare, She Ain't What She Used to Be. And we see the emergence almost of tailgating with this particular sport as well. This is a family affair. There are often food carts here with delicious things to eat. And so we're seeing something that if we squint hard enough, we kind of see a little bit of a sports culture emerging. Boxing is going to be another forerunner here. But the Victorians have a real love-hate relationship with... boxing early on in the 1820s and 30s. The Victorians are a little prudish about the violence and the gambling associated with boxing, but there are definitely people who do pay attention to the sport. One of the first sports celebrities is going to emerge out of boxing, and this is John Oldsmoke Morrissey, who's going to actually shift from being simply a boxer to also a very successful businessman, and is even going to make the leap to Congress as well. One thing that helps to improve the image of boxing are some very specific rules established by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, providing a little more of a civilized sheen to the sport for those Prudish Victorians. A number of men's athletic clubs will offer the manly art of self-defense, and they will have exhibition matches demonstrating the new boxing under the Marquess of Queensberry rules. And another gentleman... and I use that term loosely, he's actually a gutter journalist by the name of Richard Kyle Fox, is going to promote the sport very heavily in the 19th century, introduce weight categories, introduce the idea of rounds, and introduce championship belts as well. He's going to fake a fight, a feud, with one of the great boxers of the era, John L. Sullivan, elevating him to national status. And while John Morrissey enjoyed some fame on the eastern seaboard, particularly Sullivan as the toast of the town from coast to coast. But let's get into the first team sport I think that really sets the stage and really establishes sporting life as a major part of American culture, and that is baseball. I'm going to disavow you first and foremost of the idea that somehow Abner Doubleday invented the game of baseball in Cooperstown, New York in 1830, whatever. Not true at all. Baseball is actually an 18th century game. We just don't know how it was played in the 18th century. There are actually rules on the books forbidding the playing of baseball within 500 feet of the new town hall in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for example. The guy who really brings it home and creates some rules we do know about is the fellow you're looking at on the screen right now. This is Alexander Joy Cartwright. He and his friends in 1842 formed the New York Knickerbockers. In an 1845, Cartwright is going to formalize his baseball club with bylaws, participation fees, and most importantly, a written set of rules, which we still have with us today. Now, this game is not quite the same as you and I know today, but if you squint hard enough, you begin to understand it. At this point, pitching is still done underhanded with the pitcher or hurler, as he's called at that point, ideally there to put the ball into play, not to throw. tricky curveballs and strike everybody out. There are fair and foul lines established with 30 paces between bases, somewhere between 90 and 105 feet, depending on your pace. A ball is considered out if it is caught on the fly or the first bounce, actually. And it is three strikes and you're out, but you can wait for your pitch. There are no called strikes unless you actually swing and miss. And at this point, we're not playing nine innings. We're playing to 21 aces or 21 runs. with an equal number of at-bat and in the fields for both teams. As our players get better, the nine innings evolve by 1858. And this becomes a wildly popular sport initially on the eastern seaboard, but with the development of the Steenship and with more rail lines growing up, it actually manages to march west to the Midwest by 1858, and they're playing baseball all the way out in San Francisco. And this is the first, I would say, team sport that really does catch on like wildfire. You're going to see quite a bit happening as a result of that. 1860s, there's also the publication of Beatles Dime Baseball Player. If you live anywhere on a rail line, you can order this book and pick it up and learn how to play. This is a sport that's just perfect to spread because the equipment is really minimal. You've got the bat, the ball, no gloves yet at this point. You can improvise your bases. If you've got a vacant lot, an open field, you can play this game. The Civil War acts as a kind of incubator for this. sport, which is really catching on. A lot of the soldiers play it in camp. It's even played in prison camps. When the soldiers march home at the end of the war, baseball is the national pastime. Now, one of the individuals who's really an important evangelist for the sport is Harry Wright. He kind of takes things to the next level. He pays some players up to $1,000 a year. That's two times a professional clerk's salary at this point to play ball for him and hires the very best players from the East Coast to play for his Cincinnati Red Stockings. And he also conducts rigorous practices, requires players to stay in shape in the offseason, schedules games, manages travel, oversees ticket sales. So we're charging a gate fee to see the games and really invents the manager position for baseball. He also designs a very practical, consistent uniform with a campaign style hat that has a forward facing brim, replacing the round hats that were worn earlier almost look like farmer hats straw hats also has a red c on the front of the shirt which announces where they're from cincinnati they have red stockings and knickers that reinforce that design and so we're seeing the emergence of a professional baseball uniform these players also wear cleats to improve their performance and they travel in their initial year more than 12 000 miles to play baseball including a trip all the way to san francisco on the newly established Transcontinental Railroad. By 1871, we see the emergence of the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, kind of the forerunner to Major League Baseball. It's the birth of the first professional league, and among the inaugural teams was the Forest City Baseball Club. You're looking at one of the rarest baseball cards in existence, actually, which is the... team furthest west in this National Association of Professional Baseball Players. They're established in Rockford, Illinois, actually, and that team is an incubator for Albert Goodwill Spalding, who plays as a rookie, a non-professional for this team, before being poached by the Sox. And then, of course, we also see the establishment of the Chicago White Stockings. Just to confuse everybody, the White Stockings eventually become the Cubs. One of... Albert Goodwill Spalding, who plays for... the four cities. He plays for Boston. He plays as well for Chicago White Stockings. He is an incredibly important figure as well in the emergence of baseball. He will go on to serve as pitcher and captain for the Chicago White Stockings. He will also spend a lifetime as a vocal advocate for the game. And in 1878, an injury leads Spalding to look to the more commercial side of baseball. And so he standardizes and manufactures baseball bats, the balls. Gloves, which begin emerging in the mid to late 1870s, and then emerges into other sports as well, and so becomes a really sporting entrepreneur. He is a shameless proselytizer for the game as well, and actually stages a world baseball tour October of 1888 till May of 1889, evangelizing the merits of the sport on the world stage, leads a commission to study the origins of baseball, and really helps to establish the Abner Doubleday myth. Another person who's very important to baseball is Henry Chadwick. He's an Englishman, early sports reporter, and he falls in love with this game of baseball. He begins to experiment with methods to reduce each game and each season to statistical analysis. He designs the first composite box score in the 1860s, tracks each player's contributions to the game, their runs, their hits, put outs, as he calls them, wild pitches, pass balls, strikeouts. errors, batting average, and so really establishes a statistical tradition, kind of the forerunner to what we would call Sabre metrics today. So we see the original National Association of Professional Baseball Players is defunct fairly quickly, and William Hobart establishes his National League of Baseball Clubs to fill that vacuum in 1876. His Professional Baseball League does not holds Sunday games, does not offer booze in the stands, charges 50 cents for a game, which is about a half day's wages. And a guy comes along a few years later, Denny McKnight, and he says, well, you know, I want to make this a little more accessible and affordable and frankly a little more fun and he established the American Association of Baseball Clubs which is sometimes nicknamed the Beer League. He charges 25 cents per game, a lot less than what the National League is charging, and sells beer at the games and plays on Sundays so more people have access to leisure time to see the games and the level of play between the two leagues is actually pretty much on par. They are equals and they do establish an informal championship in the postseason, which becomes a forerunner to the World Series. However, I will say the American Association of Baseball Clubs does not last. However, the short-lived American Association of Baseball Clubs does briefly integrate the sport of baseball when Moses Fleetwood Walker is signed to the Toledo Club. However, they're going to go bankrupt in 1892. Meanwhile, the National League... One of their players, a captain, Cap Anson, who is still a Hall of Famer, is going to lead the charge to segregate baseball in 1887, a rule which will stand for six decades, unfortunately. Ben Johnson is going to step into the void left by the bankrupt American Association of Baseball Clubs and establish his own American League in 1899. And in the winter of 1902-1903, the National League and the American League recognize each other as major leagues. and decided to formally establish a World Series between the organizations October of 1903. Now we're seeing baseball look a lot like we're used to, with a few exceptions. In 1920, since African-American players are frozen out of Major League Baseball, Rube Foster is going to organize an eight-team Negro National League, which occasionally does stage exhibition matches against white teams as well. league will fold in 1931 against the backdrop of the Great Depression, but Gus Grendel will create a new National League in 1933. Now, it's going to take us until Jackie Robinson starts at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, April 15, 1947, before that 60-year so-called gentleman's agreement that segregates baseball is going to completely and formally end. Let's talk about women in baseball, though, too. Women take to baseball in the 1860s, and Vassar College becomes a very important incubator for women's sports in that era and beyond. And here we're looking at the 1876 Vassar College Resolutes. Beginning in the 1890s, paid female athletes begin barnstorming with what are called Bloomer League teams, playing and often beating local men's teams. And the largely female roster has one to three males, usually in the position of pitcher. maybe catcher, shortstop, or first base. But they are solid baseball players, and they often beat those men's teams. However, there's kind of a reaction in the 1930s against women's athletics, and the Great Depression also plays a role, and the Bloomer teams end in 1934. Less than a decade later, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League will be established in the depths of World War II to fill that void, and then some with a league of their own. Let's go back to some other sports that emerged in the 19th century. Let's go back to the 1850s and 60s. We begin to see sporting culture flourishing on college campuses. There are crew races between Yale and Harvard drawing record crowds by 1852. Track and field is going to follow as does baseball in 1859. And then a decade later, a new sport is going to rise that's going to rival baseball in the years to come. There was a tradition of informal competitions between classes that included games that kind of mixed the rules of soccer and rugby. And an intercollegiate match featuring this hybrid game between Princeton and Rutgers is going to introduce the wider world to the sport of American football. Just to really confuse things though, by the way, FIFA also lists this particular game, November 6th of 1869, as the first intercollegiate soccer match in the United States. So it's both football and soccer kind of at this point. points. Now this informal game has very casual rules in the beginning. The early game pits two teams of 25 players against each other with points awarded for drop kicking a fat oblong ball through goal posts. Grew more physical with blocking and tackling resulting in serious injuries and this is a really violent physical sport. A player could only be ejected if he was guilty of slugging another player three times. This is really a rough sport. It's going to change with people like Walter Chauncey Camp, who's going to come to Yale in 1876, and he begins to work to reform and modernize football. He creates a set of rules setting football apart from rugby and soccer, so it's more clear how the game is played. He encourages synchronized play, reduces the number of players on the field to 11, introduces the kickoff and scrimmage, creates the first gridiron with fairs, which we now call downs. And, um... tackling below the waist. It's becoming a little less violent, although it's still a pretty tough sport. In the 1890s, football comes west when the University of Chicago hires Amos Alonzo Stagg to create a department of physical culture and athletics. And by 1905, Stagg's football team is drawing record crowds, so much so that Marshall Field himself is going to build Stagg a 25,000 seat stadium. 1905 sees the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association with further revisions. Palmer Pierce is a champion of a more open game here. No more interlocking arms and pushing or pulling the ball carrier over the goal line. He stresses innovative offense, he actually lengthens the distance of downs to the 10 yards we're used to, encourages more deceptive running plays, and legalizes the forward pass with more tightly inflated. ball in play now at this point. We also see some safety equipment beginning to emerge, including the leather helmet and shoulder pads, although unfortunately it was considered more manly not to wear the helmet for a while. I tell you, some things are very different about the sport today. One of the most important figures to emerge in this era is also Glenn Pop Warner. As the rules continue to evolve, the value of the touchdown has increased to six points, points with only one point for field goals, and no one takes to the new strategies of synchronized play and the value of passing and deceptive running more than Pop Warner is going to. His Carlisle Indian School team meets West Point in a legendary game in 1912, and this game is going to pit future Olympian Jim Thorpe against future general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower. And there's a speech that's given at this game with the Carlisle Indian School where they talked about the fact that their ancestors had fought on a very different battlefield. And the Carlisle Indian School's no-huddle offense, guided by Pop Warner, their speed, their innovative new formations absolutely lead them to crush West Point 27-6. And Eisenhower is injured in the game as well. We also see with football emergence of some other... sports traditions we take for granted today. Football leads to the establishment of live animals as mascots, and you're looking at Yale's Handsome Dan from 1889, one of the early mascots of the game. We also see with football the Yale squad and cheerleading sections emerging by 1898. Now, this was an all-male group prior to 1923, and to be elected a cheerleader was really considered a very, very high honor. By the 19-teens, colleges and universities begin to recognize football as a goldmine, and they invite alumni back home for a football game, a parade, a dance, and give birth to the homecoming tradition that we think of today. And there's sort of our official early fan wear, raccoon skin and camel hair coats are very traditionally associated with football in the 1920s. 20s, they become synonymous with the game. Ladies really dress to the nines in the early years. You can see our ladies, our fans, dress very stylishly here in an early game for the 19-teens. By the 20s and 30s, we at least begin to see comfortable trousers emerging and really great fan service. Now, as college football grows in popularity, there are several Midwestern teams that see an opportunity to establish a professional league. In 1920, they meet at Ralph E. Hayes'Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio, to establish the American Professional Football Association, which has changed to the National Football League in 1922. We see the emergence of the NFL, basically. Now, involved in that early meeting were George Hallis'Staley Starchmakers, who were going to change their name to the Bears in 1921, as they take on another team representing the Indian Meat packing company of Green Bay, the Packers. So the Bears-Packers rivalry is really the oldest rivalry in professional football. Now, professional football is rarely drawing a crowd of more than 5,000 at this time. until college star Red Grange is signed to the Bears in the 1924 season. And suddenly we're seeing 70,000 fans in the stands, and we are off to the races. Let's dial back to the mid-19th century again. Against this backdrop, team sports such as baseball and football are developing against a broader culture of rising interest in competitive sports and a strong belief that they inculcate healthy values in our youth. Thomas Hughes writes a popular book, Tom Brown's School Days, which extols the virtues of teamwork and fair play in England and in the United States. Our answer to that is William Gilbert Patton, under the pen name of Bert Standish, who publishes 200 short stories and books about a dual sport athlete, Frank Marawell, who plays both baseball and football. And he really helps to lead to a rise in American sports culture at this time. The 19th century also sees the rise of athletic clubs, the first of which is the famed Union Club of New York, which offers a gymnasium, a swimming pool, weightlifting, and an indoor running track established all the way back in 1836. The New York Athletic, I should say, after the Civil War, athletic clubs begin to really blossom. The New York Athletic Club opens in 1868 and becomes a model for others. establish a standardized rule book for track and field. They keep records. By the late 1800s, any city of 100,000 people or more has an athletic club. These really become the incubators of amateur sports and Olympic athletes as well as we get into the 20th century, late 19th, 20th century, I should say. In addition, in private suburban communities, we see country clubs, which become kind of an offshoot of this movement, offering green space. and recreation, and these become incubators for newly emerging sports like golf and tennis. Now, golf is going to arrive to American shores in 1888 with the establishment of St. Andrew's Golf Club, and by 1900, there are more than a thousand courses in the country, including the Chicago Golf Club in Downers Grove, one of the earliest in the Midwest, and the early courses are often only nine holes, with 18 holes becoming more the standard for tournaments by the 1920s. Now, the sport of golf proves very attractive to both men and women. It mixes moderate exercise in the open air with mental stimulation and socialization, and it's much friendlier to Victorian and Edwardian wardrobes. You can play this in more formal clothing. Male players and spectators often add Scottish elements to their dress, including tartan socks, tamo chanter hats. tweed clothing, women are going to have to wait a while longer for the wardrobe to be a little more attuned to professional athletic performance, as you can see. You can imagine golfing and something like that. Now, the track and field sports of the athletic clubs and the game of golf incubated in American country clubs really helps to propel one of America's great all-around female athletes, Babe Dedrickson, to Olympic gold by 1932. into 10 lgba championships for the 1930s and 40s now the 1880s also sees the rise of tennis clubs in the united states fostered by the national lawn tennis association which was founded in 1881 like golf tennis is deemed a sports ideal for both men and women and provides that moderate exercise and socialization early uniforms begin to emerge for men we have the white long-sleeved shirt and um often white flannel pants, and for ladies, white dresses are typically the norm. Spectators often drew inspiration from the outfits of the competitors, with men wearing white flannel trousers complemented by a navy blazer. Women are wearing knee-length pleated summer dresses in white or pastels. And Helen Wills is going to rocket to fame in the 1920s and early 30s as the first great dominant female athlete of the sport of tennis. And here we can see her uniform is slightly more modern in that she's lost the long sleeves, which had to be very cumbersome. I imagine that that skirt has to be pretty tough to play in. Now, athletic clubs and country clubs and tennis clubs are fine if you've got a little coin, but the blue-collar answer, the more affordable answer to those, is the YMCA, which provides an affordable venue to promote the ethos of what's... being called muscular Christianity and physical culture. Founded initially in England in 1844, the YMCA arrives in the United States on the eve of the Civil War and finds very fertile soil here. And we have political leaders who are looking at this emerging sports culture with approval. Two of the great champions of this physical culture movement are Theodore Roosevelt, who is a champion of what he calls the strenuous life. He even writes essays and addresses along those lines. And Woodrow Wilson, who is in particular a champion of the sport of football. Now, the YMCA's training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, becomes a blue-collar incubator. for the value of exercise and team sports. And by 1900, we see 350 YMCAs around the country boasting squash courts, gymnasiums, running tracks, swimming pools. And in communities that have a strong German contingent, we also see the emergence of what are called Turner Halls, part of the Turner movement of physical culture as well. Now, the Y Training School is going to introduce several new sports to the United States as well. One of those is introduced by James Naismith, who you see here. He introduces his students to a game involving two peach baskets suspended 10 feet above the floor based on a childhood game he knew called Duck on a Rock. He lays down 13 basic rules, emphasizes good passing and marksmanship, and the sport of basketball is born. This becomes hugely popular as a sport for the winter season. great for smaller rural communities because you don't need a really big team to play the sport and you can nail a basket to a garage door or up in a barn post and play to your heart's content. Vassar College is going to pick up on the sport of basketball and women's teams again are going to blossom there and we actually see a photograph here of some very spirited play from 1907 at Vassar College. William Morgan is going to be another player. important student of the YMCA school, and he's going to invent another sport. He strings up a tennis net at a height of six feet six above the floor, puts a soccer ball to new use, and invents the sport of volleyball. Another gentleman who comes out of the YMCA school is Dr. Luther Gulick. He's going to take sports into the school system, establishing the public schools athletic league in 1902. for boys and a comparable program was established by 1905 for girls as well. Now let's also look at some additional outdoor recreation that would grow up during this time period and past times you would have found in backyards in Elmhurst and the western suburbs as well. One of the more curious ones is the Victorians begin to embrace a 13th century French game which was exported to Ireland in the 1830s which was played with wooden mallets and wooden hoops called crookie. We know it as croquet. In 1852, a London entrepreneur named John Jock seizes on the sport, standardizes the equipment and rules, and sells full croquet sets. And in the United States, anything the Victorians in England are doing, we're going to do and do better. And so we begin playing croquet here as well. It can be easily played in those confining Victorian clothes. It provides light exercise, gets us out of doors, allows socialization. And it's a chance for young people to get out from under the nose of those nosy chaperones and fraternize with each other, men and women. And it's hugely popular in the 1870s all the way through the World War I era. Another backyard game that's going to emerge is going to go from the battlefield to the backyard. Civil War soldiers created an improvised version of the ancient sport of quoits. using mule horseshoes, mule shoes, and to pass their boredom. And like baseball, they play this game of horseshoes in camp, and they march home with the habit of playing this and keep the game of horseshoes alive in backyards across America. And like everything else in the 19th century, we've got to standardize the equipment and the rules, create our own bylaws, and we even establish tournaments, which are very popular in our formal rules by 1869. Now, no discussion of sports and physical culture is complete without talking about the bicycle craze of the 1890s. Now, early bicycles emerge in the 19th century. The earliest ones are very dangerous affairs called penny farthings or high wheelers. You can see there's a big wheel and a small wheel. And this is really for people who are almost stuntmen. This is a pretty dangerous ride. With the invention of the safety bicycle, suddenly we touch off a national craze. These are safe to ride. They're fairly inexpensive. And we are off to the races. The bicycle is usable by men and women alike. They're inexpensive. They open new horizons for women. Susan B. Anthony is going to dub the bicycle the freedom machine. And the bicycle is even going to influence fashion, particularly women's fashion. We see the emergence of divided riding skirts and even bloomers, which are more practical for riding the bicycle. And we see bicycle races, tricycle races on circular tracks and overland races. which precedes a new era of racing by mechanical means. I'm going to get into that in a minute. And we see bicycle shops grow up across the nation, including in our own Elmhurst right here. Now, no discussion of bicycle would be complete without a shameless plug for J. Hart Rosdale, an Elmhurst resident and social studies teacher. J. Hart Rosdale rides his bicycle into the Guinness Book of World Records. He holds the title for more than a decade. as the world's most traveled man logging many of those miles on his beloved bicycle, Jacqueline, which is now in the collection of the Elmhurst History Museum, actually, an Elmhurst original right there. Now, in 1894, a reliability test is held in Rouen, France, between motorists using the newfangled automobile. It's really the first auto race. Thanksgiving Day of 1895, the sport of racing comes to the United States with a newspaper-sponsored race. between Evanston and Chicago. The following year, a circular racetrack is established at Narragansett, which ushers in the era of speedway racing, and we see the establishment of overland races as well, probably the most famous of which is the Great Automobile Race of 1908, an international race sponsored by a New York newspaper, which begins in New York and ends in Paris. The American Automobile entry, the Thomas Flyer Handley wins this. People are glued to this race, and it passes very close to Elmhurst, actually. Follows what becomes a lot of the Lincoln Highway, actually, once upon a time. Now, in the first years of automobile races, these are pretty slow affairs. Top speeds range between 10 and 20 miles an hour. But as high-performance engines improve racing, this becomes a sport of daredevils. Like our World War I race, Eddie Rickenbacker, who's pictured here. Also influences fashion as well. We see the duster coats, the goggles, the hats, veils for women. This is a dusty affair. These are largely open cockpit affairs in the very beginning. And, of course, again, one last shameless plug, and I'm going to bring it home. In the era of Prohibition, souped-up versions of ordinary automobiles helped bootleggers to stay ahead of federal agents and also give rise to competitions that are going to lay the... a foundation for what becomes NASCAR. In the 1960s, one of our own, Fred Lorenzen, is going to emerge as the Elmhurst Express, making his NASCAR debut, and we've got some great footage of some of his races here and some of his stories in our galleries as well, so I invite you to enjoy. I want to say a very special thank you to the Downers Grove Historical Society, Elmhurst History Museum, Henry B. Plant Museum, Library of Congress, Midway Village Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. for the loan of some of the wonderful images you've seen here, and I thank all of you for joining me. Come visit us at the Elmer's History Museum to learn a little bit more. We'll be seeing you. Thanks.

We can't get to everything, and I should point out that really sports are as old as civilization. But what we're going to talk about, what emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is something new, both in the United States and around the world. For the most of human history, we played a variety of folk games with very loose rules that would vary geographically.

What we're talking about in the 19th and early 20th century is the emergence of organized sports and sports culture that have standardized rules, standardized uniforms, bylaws, statistics, agreed upon equipment from coast to coast. And we're going to talk a little bit about why this happens, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of the overall presentation. So let's get started. What happens in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries is we go through a period of modernization, urbanization, and even a shift, really, in the way that we understand time. For most of human history, we observe what we call agricultural time.

And in agricultural time, we kind of... blend leisure time with work very often. Think of quilting bees, husking bees.

There isn't this formal, now it's time to work, now it's time to play, other than maybe a few festival days, saint's days, and those sorts of things. With industrialization, with urbanization, with more people living close together, and with a more linear division between leisure time and work time, suddenly we need a way to fill that leisure time a little bit. We also see in the really 18th and early 19th centuries and beyond revolutions in transportation and communication, those will continue well into the 19th century, the telegraph emerges, the telephone emerges, the steamship, the locomotive. Suddenly we're able to communicate over vast distances of space and we are actually able to travel to play the emerging games I'm going to talk about a little bit. to keep the statistics.

And we have a highly literate culture as well that is growing up with our formal education system. And these folks want things to read about, and not strictly history, although that's always wonderful. We want to read about sports and how our teams are doing in this era as well. With industrialization and urbanization comes standardization. More people are packed together in closer spaces, and we're very precise on how we measure things.

We have agreed upon weights and measures. We're timing things in our factories. And again, this idea of leisure time makes it easier to establish clubs and schedule games.

And we want to be as precise with how we're playing those games and measuring those games as we are on the factory floor. So let's talk about some of the first individual and team sports that begin to emerge and set the board for our evolving sports culture. One of the first organized team competitions is held in 1824. on the Hudson, pitting the American rowing club called the White Haulers against a British crew of rowers.

And this actually draws a crowd of 20,000 people with a $1,000 purse. So this is kind of a major event. So who knew that rowing is going to help set the stage for all of this?

By the mid-1830s, there are 20 rowing clubs from Boston all the way down to Savannah along the eastern seaboard. By 1872... We actually see the creation of the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen with more than 200 clubs. We have standardized rules, standardized equipment, and bylaws. So again, we're using that precision from the factory floor for our emerging sports culture as well.

A few years earlier, horse racing is going to help to set the stage a little bit too for the emergence of our sports culture. In 1821, New York legalizes competitive horse racing. leading to the creation of formal organizations that bring consistency to the rules, track conditions, and record keeping.

And by 1842, the New York Jockey Club refines those rules and establishes a uniform as part of rule number 53, with a jockey cap, a colored jacket, pantaloons, and boots. Basically, we're seeing the creation of an actual sports uniform, something we're going to see happen again and again and again. sport that the common person can participate in. If you're going to go to a racing tournament, this could last three days. Horse flesh is very expensive.

There's a reason we call this the sport of kings. And so this is not something that the average common person is going to see. By the way, you can see that jockey uniform emerging right there from a Harper's Weekly illustration. The more blue collar approach is harness racing.

And here the owner and driver are the same. The horse has a day job as does the driver. These are largely trotters that are pulling a lot of the wagons around town. But we get the idea on the eastern seaboard of establishing these trotting clubs and races, harness races.

The newer trotting club was established in 1824. It has its own standardized rules. The most famous racing horse of the era. is David Bryan's Lady Suffolk, who is nicknamed the Old Gray Mare and inspires the song we know today, The Old Gray Mare, She Ain't What She Used to Be.

And we see the emergence almost of tailgating with this particular sport as well. This is a family affair. There are often food carts here with delicious things to eat.

And so we're seeing something that if we squint hard enough, we kind of see a little bit of a sports culture emerging. Boxing is going to be another forerunner here. But the Victorians have a real love-hate relationship with... boxing early on in the 1820s and 30s. The Victorians are a little prudish about the violence and the gambling associated with boxing, but there are definitely people who do pay attention to the sport.

One of the first sports celebrities is going to emerge out of boxing, and this is John Oldsmoke Morrissey, who's going to actually shift from being simply a boxer to also a very successful businessman, and is even going to make the leap to Congress as well. One thing that helps to improve the image of boxing are some very specific rules established by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, providing a little more of a civilized sheen to the sport for those Prudish Victorians. A number of men's athletic clubs will offer the manly art of self-defense, and they will have exhibition matches demonstrating the new boxing under the Marquess of Queensberry rules.

And another gentleman... and I use that term loosely, he's actually a gutter journalist by the name of Richard Kyle Fox, is going to promote the sport very heavily in the 19th century, introduce weight categories, introduce the idea of rounds, and introduce championship belts as well. He's going to fake a fight, a feud, with one of the great boxers of the era, John L. Sullivan, elevating him to national status. And while John Morrissey enjoyed some fame on the eastern seaboard, particularly Sullivan as the toast of the town from coast to coast. But let's get into the first team sport I think that really sets the stage and really establishes sporting life as a major part of American culture, and that is baseball.

I'm going to disavow you first and foremost of the idea that somehow Abner Doubleday invented the game of baseball in Cooperstown, New York in 1830, whatever. Not true at all. Baseball is actually an 18th century game. We just don't know how it was played in the 18th century. There are actually rules on the books forbidding the playing of baseball within 500 feet of the new town hall in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for example.

The guy who really brings it home and creates some rules we do know about is the fellow you're looking at on the screen right now. This is Alexander Joy Cartwright. He and his friends in 1842 formed the New York Knickerbockers.

In an 1845, Cartwright is going to formalize his baseball club with bylaws, participation fees, and most importantly, a written set of rules, which we still have with us today. Now, this game is not quite the same as you and I know today, but if you squint hard enough, you begin to understand it. At this point, pitching is still done underhanded with the pitcher or hurler, as he's called at that point, ideally there to put the ball into play, not to throw. tricky curveballs and strike everybody out. There are fair and foul lines established with 30 paces between bases, somewhere between 90 and 105 feet, depending on your pace.

A ball is considered out if it is caught on the fly or the first bounce, actually. And it is three strikes and you're out, but you can wait for your pitch. There are no called strikes unless you actually swing and miss. And at this point, we're not playing nine innings.

We're playing to 21 aces or 21 runs. with an equal number of at-bat and in the fields for both teams. As our players get better, the nine innings evolve by 1858. And this becomes a wildly popular sport initially on the eastern seaboard, but with the development of the Steenship and with more rail lines growing up, it actually manages to march west to the Midwest by 1858, and they're playing baseball all the way out in San Francisco. And this is the first, I would say, team sport that really does catch on like wildfire. You're going to see quite a bit happening as a result of that.

1860s, there's also the publication of Beatles Dime Baseball Player. If you live anywhere on a rail line, you can order this book and pick it up and learn how to play. This is a sport that's just perfect to spread because the equipment is really minimal. You've got the bat, the ball, no gloves yet at this point.

You can improvise your bases. If you've got a vacant lot, an open field, you can play this game. The Civil War acts as a kind of incubator for this.

sport, which is really catching on. A lot of the soldiers play it in camp. It's even played in prison camps.

When the soldiers march home at the end of the war, baseball is the national pastime. Now, one of the individuals who's really an important evangelist for the sport is Harry Wright. He kind of takes things to the next level.

He pays some players up to $1,000 a year. That's two times a professional clerk's salary at this point to play ball for him and hires the very best players from the East Coast to play for his Cincinnati Red Stockings. And he also conducts rigorous practices, requires players to stay in shape in the offseason, schedules games, manages travel, oversees ticket sales. So we're charging a gate fee to see the games and really invents the manager position for baseball. He also designs a very practical, consistent uniform with a campaign style hat that has a forward facing brim, replacing the round hats that were worn earlier almost look like farmer hats straw hats also has a red c on the front of the shirt which announces where they're from cincinnati they have red stockings and knickers that reinforce that design and so we're seeing the emergence of a professional baseball uniform these players also wear cleats to improve their performance and they travel in their initial year more than 12 000 miles to play baseball including a trip all the way to san francisco on the newly established Transcontinental Railroad.

By 1871, we see the emergence of the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, kind of the forerunner to Major League Baseball. It's the birth of the first professional league, and among the inaugural teams was the Forest City Baseball Club. You're looking at one of the rarest baseball cards in existence, actually, which is the...

team furthest west in this National Association of Professional Baseball Players. They're established in Rockford, Illinois, actually, and that team is an incubator for Albert Goodwill Spalding, who plays as a rookie, a non-professional for this team, before being poached by the Sox. And then, of course, we also see the establishment of the Chicago White Stockings. Just to confuse everybody, the White Stockings eventually become the Cubs.

One of... Albert Goodwill Spalding, who plays for... the four cities. He plays for Boston. He plays as well for Chicago White Stockings.

He is an incredibly important figure as well in the emergence of baseball. He will go on to serve as pitcher and captain for the Chicago White Stockings. He will also spend a lifetime as a vocal advocate for the game. And in 1878, an injury leads Spalding to look to the more commercial side of baseball.

And so he standardizes and manufactures baseball bats, the balls. Gloves, which begin emerging in the mid to late 1870s, and then emerges into other sports as well, and so becomes a really sporting entrepreneur. He is a shameless proselytizer for the game as well, and actually stages a world baseball tour October of 1888 till May of 1889, evangelizing the merits of the sport on the world stage, leads a commission to study the origins of baseball, and really helps to establish the Abner Doubleday myth.

Another person who's very important to baseball is Henry Chadwick. He's an Englishman, early sports reporter, and he falls in love with this game of baseball. He begins to experiment with methods to reduce each game and each season to statistical analysis.

He designs the first composite box score in the 1860s, tracks each player's contributions to the game, their runs, their hits, put outs, as he calls them, wild pitches, pass balls, strikeouts. errors, batting average, and so really establishes a statistical tradition, kind of the forerunner to what we would call Sabre metrics today. So we see the original National Association of Professional Baseball Players is defunct fairly quickly, and William Hobart establishes his National League of Baseball Clubs to fill that vacuum in 1876. His Professional Baseball League does not holds Sunday games, does not offer booze in the stands, charges 50 cents for a game, which is about a half day's wages.

And a guy comes along a few years later, Denny McKnight, and he says, well, you know, I want to make this a little more accessible and affordable and frankly a little more fun and he established the American Association of Baseball Clubs which is sometimes nicknamed the Beer League. He charges 25 cents per game, a lot less than what the National League is charging, and sells beer at the games and plays on Sundays so more people have access to leisure time to see the games and the level of play between the two leagues is actually pretty much on par. They are equals and they do establish an informal championship in the postseason, which becomes a forerunner to the World Series.

However, I will say the American Association of Baseball Clubs does not last. However, the short-lived American Association of Baseball Clubs does briefly integrate the sport of baseball when Moses Fleetwood Walker is signed to the Toledo Club. However, they're going to go bankrupt in 1892. Meanwhile, the National League... One of their players, a captain, Cap Anson, who is still a Hall of Famer, is going to lead the charge to segregate baseball in 1887, a rule which will stand for six decades, unfortunately.

Ben Johnson is going to step into the void left by the bankrupt American Association of Baseball Clubs and establish his own American League in 1899. And in the winter of 1902-1903, the National League and the American League recognize each other as major leagues. and decided to formally establish a World Series between the organizations October of 1903. Now we're seeing baseball look a lot like we're used to, with a few exceptions. In 1920, since African-American players are frozen out of Major League Baseball, Rube Foster is going to organize an eight-team Negro National League, which occasionally does stage exhibition matches against white teams as well. league will fold in 1931 against the backdrop of the Great Depression, but Gus Grendel will create a new National League in 1933. Now, it's going to take us until Jackie Robinson starts at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, April 15, 1947, before that 60-year so-called gentleman's agreement that segregates baseball is going to completely and formally end. Let's talk about women in baseball, though, too.

Women take to baseball in the 1860s, and Vassar College becomes a very important incubator for women's sports in that era and beyond. And here we're looking at the 1876 Vassar College Resolutes. Beginning in the 1890s, paid female athletes begin barnstorming with what are called Bloomer League teams, playing and often beating local men's teams. And the largely female roster has one to three males, usually in the position of pitcher.

maybe catcher, shortstop, or first base. But they are solid baseball players, and they often beat those men's teams. However, there's kind of a reaction in the 1930s against women's athletics, and the Great Depression also plays a role, and the Bloomer teams end in 1934. Less than a decade later, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League will be established in the depths of World War II to fill that void, and then some with a league of their own.

Let's go back to some other sports that emerged in the 19th century. Let's go back to the 1850s and 60s. We begin to see sporting culture flourishing on college campuses. There are crew races between Yale and Harvard drawing record crowds by 1852. Track and field is going to follow as does baseball in 1859. And then a decade later, a new sport is going to rise that's going to rival baseball in the years to come. There was a tradition of informal competitions between classes that included games that kind of mixed the rules of soccer and rugby.

And an intercollegiate match featuring this hybrid game between Princeton and Rutgers is going to introduce the wider world to the sport of American football. Just to really confuse things though, by the way, FIFA also lists this particular game, November 6th of 1869, as the first intercollegiate soccer match in the United States. So it's both football and soccer kind of at this point.

points. Now this informal game has very casual rules in the beginning. The early game pits two teams of 25 players against each other with points awarded for drop kicking a fat oblong ball through goal posts.

Grew more physical with blocking and tackling resulting in serious injuries and this is a really violent physical sport. A player could only be ejected if he was guilty of slugging another player three times. This is really a rough sport. It's going to change with people like Walter Chauncey Camp, who's going to come to Yale in 1876, and he begins to work to reform and modernize football.

He creates a set of rules setting football apart from rugby and soccer, so it's more clear how the game is played. He encourages synchronized play, reduces the number of players on the field to 11, introduces the kickoff and scrimmage, creates the first gridiron with fairs, which we now call downs. And, um...

tackling below the waist. It's becoming a little less violent, although it's still a pretty tough sport. In the 1890s, football comes west when the University of Chicago hires Amos Alonzo Stagg to create a department of physical culture and athletics.

And by 1905, Stagg's football team is drawing record crowds, so much so that Marshall Field himself is going to build Stagg a 25,000 seat stadium. 1905 sees the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association with further revisions. Palmer Pierce is a champion of a more open game here. No more interlocking arms and pushing or pulling the ball carrier over the goal line.

He stresses innovative offense, he actually lengthens the distance of downs to the 10 yards we're used to, encourages more deceptive running plays, and legalizes the forward pass with more tightly inflated. ball in play now at this point. We also see some safety equipment beginning to emerge, including the leather helmet and shoulder pads, although unfortunately it was considered more manly not to wear the helmet for a while.

I tell you, some things are very different about the sport today. One of the most important figures to emerge in this era is also Glenn Pop Warner. As the rules continue to evolve, the value of the touchdown has increased to six points, points with only one point for field goals, and no one takes to the new strategies of synchronized play and the value of passing and deceptive running more than Pop Warner is going to. His Carlisle Indian School team meets West Point in a legendary game in 1912, and this game is going to pit future Olympian Jim Thorpe against future general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And there's a speech that's given at this game with the Carlisle Indian School where they talked about the fact that their ancestors had fought on a very different battlefield. And the Carlisle Indian School's no-huddle offense, guided by Pop Warner, their speed, their innovative new formations absolutely lead them to crush West Point 27-6. And Eisenhower is injured in the game as well.

We also see with football emergence of some other... sports traditions we take for granted today. Football leads to the establishment of live animals as mascots, and you're looking at Yale's Handsome Dan from 1889, one of the early mascots of the game. We also see with football the Yale squad and cheerleading sections emerging by 1898. Now, this was an all-male group prior to 1923, and to be elected a cheerleader was really considered a very, very high honor. By the 19-teens, colleges and universities begin to recognize football as a goldmine, and they invite alumni back home for a football game, a parade, a dance, and give birth to the homecoming tradition that we think of today.

And there's sort of our official early fan wear, raccoon skin and camel hair coats are very traditionally associated with football in the 1920s. 20s, they become synonymous with the game. Ladies really dress to the nines in the early years. You can see our ladies, our fans, dress very stylishly here in an early game for the 19-teens. By the 20s and 30s, we at least begin to see comfortable trousers emerging and really great fan service.

Now, as college football grows in popularity, there are several Midwestern teams that see an opportunity to establish a professional league. In 1920, they meet at Ralph E. Hayes'Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio, to establish the American Professional Football Association, which has changed to the National Football League in 1922. We see the emergence of the NFL, basically. Now, involved in that early meeting were George Hallis'Staley Starchmakers, who were going to change their name to the Bears in 1921, as they take on another team representing the Indian Meat packing company of Green Bay, the Packers. So the Bears-Packers rivalry is really the oldest rivalry in professional football. Now, professional football is rarely drawing a crowd of more than 5,000 at this time.

until college star Red Grange is signed to the Bears in the 1924 season. And suddenly we're seeing 70,000 fans in the stands, and we are off to the races. Let's dial back to the mid-19th century again.

Against this backdrop, team sports such as baseball and football are developing against a broader culture of rising interest in competitive sports and a strong belief that they inculcate healthy values in our youth. Thomas Hughes writes a popular book, Tom Brown's School Days, which extols the virtues of teamwork and fair play in England and in the United States. Our answer to that is William Gilbert Patton, under the pen name of Bert Standish, who publishes 200 short stories and books about a dual sport athlete, Frank Marawell, who plays both baseball and football.

And he really helps to lead to a rise in American sports culture at this time. The 19th century also sees the rise of athletic clubs, the first of which is the famed Union Club of New York, which offers a gymnasium, a swimming pool, weightlifting, and an indoor running track established all the way back in 1836. The New York Athletic, I should say, after the Civil War, athletic clubs begin to really blossom. The New York Athletic Club opens in 1868 and becomes a model for others. establish a standardized rule book for track and field. They keep records.

By the late 1800s, any city of 100,000 people or more has an athletic club. These really become the incubators of amateur sports and Olympic athletes as well as we get into the 20th century, late 19th, 20th century, I should say. In addition, in private suburban communities, we see country clubs, which become kind of an offshoot of this movement, offering green space. and recreation, and these become incubators for newly emerging sports like golf and tennis.

Now, golf is going to arrive to American shores in 1888 with the establishment of St. Andrew's Golf Club, and by 1900, there are more than a thousand courses in the country, including the Chicago Golf Club in Downers Grove, one of the earliest in the Midwest, and the early courses are often only nine holes, with 18 holes becoming more the standard for tournaments by the 1920s. Now, the sport of golf proves very attractive to both men and women. It mixes moderate exercise in the open air with mental stimulation and socialization, and it's much friendlier to Victorian and Edwardian wardrobes.

You can play this in more formal clothing. Male players and spectators often add Scottish elements to their dress, including tartan socks, tamo chanter hats. tweed clothing, women are going to have to wait a while longer for the wardrobe to be a little more attuned to professional athletic performance, as you can see. You can imagine golfing and something like that. Now, the track and field sports of the athletic clubs and the game of golf incubated in American country clubs really helps to propel one of America's great all-around female athletes, Babe Dedrickson, to Olympic gold by 1932. into 10 lgba championships for the 1930s and 40s now the 1880s also sees the rise of tennis clubs in the united states fostered by the national lawn tennis association which was founded in 1881 like golf tennis is deemed a sports ideal for both men and women and provides that moderate exercise and socialization early uniforms begin to emerge for men we have the white long-sleeved shirt and um often white flannel pants, and for ladies, white dresses are typically the norm.

Spectators often drew inspiration from the outfits of the competitors, with men wearing white flannel trousers complemented by a navy blazer. Women are wearing knee-length pleated summer dresses in white or pastels. And Helen Wills is going to rocket to fame in the 1920s and early 30s as the first great dominant female athlete of the sport of tennis.

And here we can see her uniform is slightly more modern in that she's lost the long sleeves, which had to be very cumbersome. I imagine that that skirt has to be pretty tough to play in. Now, athletic clubs and country clubs and tennis clubs are fine if you've got a little coin, but the blue-collar answer, the more affordable answer to those, is the YMCA, which provides an affordable venue to promote the ethos of what's...

being called muscular Christianity and physical culture. Founded initially in England in 1844, the YMCA arrives in the United States on the eve of the Civil War and finds very fertile soil here. And we have political leaders who are looking at this emerging sports culture with approval. Two of the great champions of this physical culture movement are Theodore Roosevelt, who is a champion of what he calls the strenuous life. He even writes essays and addresses along those lines.

And Woodrow Wilson, who is in particular a champion of the sport of football. Now, the YMCA's training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, becomes a blue-collar incubator. for the value of exercise and team sports.

And by 1900, we see 350 YMCAs around the country boasting squash courts, gymnasiums, running tracks, swimming pools. And in communities that have a strong German contingent, we also see the emergence of what are called Turner Halls, part of the Turner movement of physical culture as well. Now, the Y Training School is going to introduce several new sports to the United States as well. One of those is introduced by James Naismith, who you see here.

He introduces his students to a game involving two peach baskets suspended 10 feet above the floor based on a childhood game he knew called Duck on a Rock. He lays down 13 basic rules, emphasizes good passing and marksmanship, and the sport of basketball is born. This becomes hugely popular as a sport for the winter season.

great for smaller rural communities because you don't need a really big team to play the sport and you can nail a basket to a garage door or up in a barn post and play to your heart's content. Vassar College is going to pick up on the sport of basketball and women's teams again are going to blossom there and we actually see a photograph here of some very spirited play from 1907 at Vassar College. William Morgan is going to be another player.

important student of the YMCA school, and he's going to invent another sport. He strings up a tennis net at a height of six feet six above the floor, puts a soccer ball to new use, and invents the sport of volleyball. Another gentleman who comes out of the YMCA school is Dr. Luther Gulick. He's going to take sports into the school system, establishing the public schools athletic league in 1902. for boys and a comparable program was established by 1905 for girls as well.

Now let's also look at some additional outdoor recreation that would grow up during this time period and past times you would have found in backyards in Elmhurst and the western suburbs as well. One of the more curious ones is the Victorians begin to embrace a 13th century French game which was exported to Ireland in the 1830s which was played with wooden mallets and wooden hoops called crookie. We know it as croquet.

In 1852, a London entrepreneur named John Jock seizes on the sport, standardizes the equipment and rules, and sells full croquet sets. And in the United States, anything the Victorians in England are doing, we're going to do and do better. And so we begin playing croquet here as well. It can be easily played in those confining Victorian clothes.

It provides light exercise, gets us out of doors, allows socialization. And it's a chance for young people to get out from under the nose of those nosy chaperones and fraternize with each other, men and women. And it's hugely popular in the 1870s all the way through the World War I era.

Another backyard game that's going to emerge is going to go from the battlefield to the backyard. Civil War soldiers created an improvised version of the ancient sport of quoits. using mule horseshoes, mule shoes, and to pass their boredom. And like baseball, they play this game of horseshoes in camp, and they march home with the habit of playing this and keep the game of horseshoes alive in backyards across America.

And like everything else in the 19th century, we've got to standardize the equipment and the rules, create our own bylaws, and we even establish tournaments, which are very popular in our formal rules by 1869. Now, no discussion of sports and physical culture is complete without talking about the bicycle craze of the 1890s. Now, early bicycles emerge in the 19th century. The earliest ones are very dangerous affairs called penny farthings or high wheelers. You can see there's a big wheel and a small wheel.

And this is really for people who are almost stuntmen. This is a pretty dangerous ride. With the invention of the safety bicycle, suddenly we touch off a national craze. These are safe to ride.

They're fairly inexpensive. And we are off to the races. The bicycle is usable by men and women alike. They're inexpensive.

They open new horizons for women. Susan B. Anthony is going to dub the bicycle the freedom machine. And the bicycle is even going to influence fashion, particularly women's fashion.

We see the emergence of divided riding skirts and even bloomers, which are more practical for riding the bicycle. And we see bicycle races, tricycle races on circular tracks and overland races. which precedes a new era of racing by mechanical means.

I'm going to get into that in a minute. And we see bicycle shops grow up across the nation, including in our own Elmhurst right here. Now, no discussion of bicycle would be complete without a shameless plug for J.

Hart Rosdale, an Elmhurst resident and social studies teacher. J. Hart Rosdale rides his bicycle into the Guinness Book of World Records. He holds the title for more than a decade.

as the world's most traveled man logging many of those miles on his beloved bicycle, Jacqueline, which is now in the collection of the Elmhurst History Museum, actually, an Elmhurst original right there. Now, in 1894, a reliability test is held in Rouen, France, between motorists using the newfangled automobile. It's really the first auto race. Thanksgiving Day of 1895, the sport of racing comes to the United States with a newspaper-sponsored race.

between Evanston and Chicago. The following year, a circular racetrack is established at Narragansett, which ushers in the era of speedway racing, and we see the establishment of overland races as well, probably the most famous of which is the Great Automobile Race of 1908, an international race sponsored by a New York newspaper, which begins in New York and ends in Paris. The American Automobile entry, the Thomas Flyer Handley wins this.

People are glued to this race, and it passes very close to Elmhurst, actually. Follows what becomes a lot of the Lincoln Highway, actually, once upon a time. Now, in the first years of automobile races, these are pretty slow affairs.

Top speeds range between 10 and 20 miles an hour. But as high-performance engines improve racing, this becomes a sport of daredevils. Like our World War I race, Eddie Rickenbacker, who's pictured here.

Also influences fashion as well. We see the duster coats, the goggles, the hats, veils for women. This is a dusty affair. These are largely open cockpit affairs in the very beginning. And, of course, again, one last shameless plug, and I'm going to bring it home.

In the era of Prohibition, souped-up versions of ordinary automobiles helped bootleggers to stay ahead of federal agents and also give rise to competitions that are going to lay the... a foundation for what becomes NASCAR. In the 1960s, one of our own, Fred Lorenzen, is going to emerge as the Elmhurst Express, making his NASCAR debut, and we've got some great footage of some of his races here and some of his stories in our galleries as well, so I invite you to enjoy.

I want to say a very special thank you to the Downers Grove Historical Society, Elmhurst History Museum, Henry B. Plant Museum, Library of Congress, Midway Village Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. for the loan of some of the wonderful images you've seen here, and I thank all of you for joining me. Come visit us at the Elmer's History Museum to learn a little bit more. We'll be seeing you.

Thanks.

Transcript for:The Evolution of Sports in America

Transcript for:
The Evolution of Sports in America