Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American Imperialism

Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American ImperialismAuthor(s): Bill BrownSource: Cultural Critique, No. 17 (Winter, 1990-1991), pp. 51-78Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354139 .

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Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American Imperialism

Bill Brown

n 1948, the anthropologist George Murdock published an account of how Japan, in 1914, successfully introduced the game

of baseball to Truk and thereby transformed a bellicose island society into a peaceful one. The violence of the "natives" had been notorious, nothing short of the Conradesque: "The most potent 'medicine' was to capture an enemy by stealth, kill him, cut off his

lips, and prop up his body with its mouth open on the beach facing the enemy country." As we might expect, foreign trade in the nineteenth century only intensified the local carnage: Ameri- cans and Japanese "sold firewater to the natives ... to inflame them against [each] other, and firearms with which to express their hostility." But in 1914, this hostility found a new arena: battlefields became ball fields. "It was the Japanese," Murdock writes, "who first gave the Trukese a satisfactory substitute for war. They introduced American baseball." As a mimetic represen-

An earlier version of this essay was presented to the Group for the Critical

Study of Colonialism at the University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank the Group for its comments and questions.

? 1990 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Winter 1990-91). All rights reserved.

51



52 Bill Brown

tation of war, the game facilitates both the expression of violence and its restraint, its restraint within the limits of representation, within the regulations of the game. Accompanied by "all the sex- ual and other taboos which used to precede war," attended by women and children "singing songs and executing magical dances

designed to discommode the foe," the island games, substantively different from war, are nonetheless its structural equivalent, leav-

ing the native culture virtually unchanged.' This difference that is the same generates the essay's climac-

tic sentence-"The natives don't play baseball, they wage it"- along with the essay's title: "Waging Baseball on Truk." But this title and this sentence seem somewhat at odds, different to the degree that waging baseball in Truk might be said to be different from waging baseball on Truk, if we take the latter phrase to mean waging baseball against these Pacific islands. (When, in 1965, Mur- dock republishes the essay as part of a book, Culture and Society, the title listed in the table of contents is "Waging Baseball in Truk"-a misprint, a slip of the pen that embodies, perhaps, a desire to arrest the ambiguity of the title that still heads the chapter itself: "Waging Baseball on Truk." But, rather than arresting that ambiguity, the misprint, of course, helps to point it out.) "Waging Baseball on Truk," against Truk, describes an essay the author never wrote. The phrase suggests not that the game can put an end to violence, but, rather, that it has a violent end, that it is an unwarranted exertion of force, with Truk as the object of aggression. And indeed, it could be said the Japanese violate the local culture by imposing their set of foreign, arbitrary rules, just as they sustain "wartime" economic relations: instead of selling firearms, they now sell regulation "balls, bats, mitts, gloves, masks, and uniforms." In the essay Murdock never wrote, what's comparable in form is comparable in content.

Unfairly, perhaps, I want to think of the subject of this un- written essay as all the violence, and notjust the symbolic violence, that was written out of Murdock's account of events in the Pacific. For just as baseball, according to this representation, suppressed the violence of the native populations, so too, within this repre-

1. George Peter Murdock, "Waging Baseball on Truk," in Culture and Society: Twenty-Four Essays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965), 290-93.



Waging Baseball, Playing War 53

sentation, the focus on baseball textually suppresses the violence of imperialist aggression. No mention is made of the fact that Japan, in 1914, seized and annexed the islands, which served as a naval base in World War II until the allied invasion; we're told that an all-Truk team defeated a team from the American Navy in 1947, but not that the navy is there as part of the American occupation, under the U.N. strategic-area trusteeship; we're not told that Micronesia had become, by that year, the site of nuclear testing. In Murdock's defense, let me say again that he originally wrote the piece in 1948, and that, though an expert in Microne- sian culture, he wrote it for a popular audience, an audience (reading Newsweek) that had no doubt heard enough about violence and politics in the Pacific. How refreshing, instead, to hear about baseball, which the essay portrays as the perfect postwar palliative: on the one hand, it points away from Japanese- American hostility to a surviving cultural affinity; on the other, it justifies the American occupation by showing the Trukese to have been always already American, with a natural passion for our national game. Also in Murdock's defense, let me say that in other publications he criticizes the American administration of the islands, but within this essay on baseball no mention of that administration is made, unless, in its conclusion, the anthropologist himself serves as the allegorical figure of the American political presence: when he describes how the natives invited him to um- pire a game, how he found himself "arbitrating five full games in a row under the tropical sun," it is difficult not to sense a subtex- tual, supratextual story of friendly, helpful, unwearying Ameri- can arbitration in the Pacific.

No doubt I may have taken Murdock's essay too seriously and too far. Yet, it seems to raise questions that can serve as avenues of entry into two other American texts: a monumental history of America's National Game-published in 1911 by Albert Spalding, who pitched for the Chicago White Stockings, became the team's president and principal owner, and ultimately emerged as a baron in the sporting-goods industry-and a juvenile sports novel, Gilbert Patten's Frank Merriwell in Peru, Or In the Land of the Incas, published in 1910-a book that recounts the adventures of the famous, fictional baseball hero off the ball field, on the stage



54 Bill Brown

of an international political theater. My simple point about both texts is that they use an American imperialist ideologeme (not just a concept, but a narrative paradigm) to legitimize the sport, which, unlike soccer or football, had not experienced such inti-

macy with jingoistic aggression. That is to say that these texts insist on making much of the imperialist possibilities of this sport- transforming a game into something serious and sociopolitically reputable-just as Murdock's text tries to keep those possibilities under wraps.

To reach that point, let me begin again with Murdock, with his decision to republish the Truk essay because the data seem "to have implications of some theoretical interest." Certainly, the so-

ciology of sport has produced a description that Murdock's data

anticipate. I am thinking in particular of Norbert Elias and Eric

Dunning's sociogenetic account of modern sports as part of a more general "civilizing process" that took place in eighteenth- century England, and their idea, which they generalize, that

sports reinvest society with the excitement lost from widespread pacification: sports do not liberate people from tension; they re- store "that measure of tension which is an essential ingredient of mental health"; they are, to borrow a phrase of William James, a "moral equivalent of war.2 Of course, at the turn of the century, in Thorstein Veblen's contrasting devolutionary model (his "satanic

teleology," as Adorno called it),3 athletic contests are conceived as

regressive "manifestations of the predatory spirit." All sports, ac-

tually "furthering" that spirit, are signs of the primitive "ferine or barbarian habit of mind."4 In the first sustained critique of the relation between sport and imperialist aggression, J. A. Hobson makes an argument that more directly challenges the Elias thesis:

2. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 89. William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910), The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 660-71. James himself looks to an industrial army, and the war against nature, rather than to sports, as a way of peacefully perpetuating wartime values.

3. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 80.

4. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institu- tions (New York: Macmillan Co., 1912), 170, 174.




the passion for sports "is a survival of the savage instinct" (as Veblen would agree); athletic events express "the animal lust of

struggle, once a necessity, [that] survives in the blood." But the

increasing rationality, or artificiality, of such outlets for aggression creates pressure "to move on to the frontiers of civilization in order that the thwarted spirit of adventure may have strong, free

play."5 Sports arouse the desire for conquest, but they cannot themselves satisfy that desire. The arguments-comparable to the

degree that each presents sport as a discharge of violent energy- conflict when it comes to naming that discharge "cathartic" or

"contaminating," when it comes to regarding the rise of sport as a

"civilizing" or "barbarizing" process.6 The conflict-reverberat-

ing though unvoiced throughout Murdock's data-hardly ex- hausts the essay's "theoretical interest," which ultimately concerns the function of sport not just within a single culture but also between cultures-sport as a mediate form of cross-cultural relations, both virtual and actual.

Indeed, though these sociological descriptions all indulge, uncritically, in a bit of Hobbesian social physics, each merits attention by taking the relation between sports and violence seriously, as part of social, not merely textual, practice. In contrast, Elaine

Scarry's recent and important critique of the conflation of "war" and "play" (necessarily addressing the cross-cultural and the international) tends to relegate the dilemma to the realm of discourse. Rightly, she argues that "the extreme inappropriateness of

importing connotations of playfulness into war" results from the fact that, though games and war may share the structure of a contest, the essential content of war is injuring, and war, like work (the absolute opposite of play), locates the individual in a realm of unfreedom, whereas the nature of play "requires that the per- son . be able to enter and exit [from the activity] freely."7 This

5. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 212-13.

6. Allen Guttmann, Sports Spectators (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 154-58, usefully articulates the distinction between the neo-Marxist theorization of catharsis and the Elias-Dunning theorization.

7. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 81-84. While it may seem crucial to establish the differences between "play," "game," and "sport," Scarry does not, and



56 Bill Brown

humanist phenomenology can explain our visceral reaction to, for instance, Teddy Roosevelt's imperialist rhetoric that makes waging war in the Philippines sound like playing a good game of football. And Scarry's censure has especial poignancy in an era when both literary and cultural theory threaten to reduce all human activity to "play" (and in an era, moreover, when our next world war is planned under the auspices of "game theory.") But the essentialist definitions disguise the fact that war and play, as concepts and as activities, are historical constructs and that the absolute opposition of work and play may well be, as Victor Turner and others have

argued, an "artifact of the industrial revolution."8 More significantly, to speak of "analogies," "descriptive conventions," "the ac- tive redescription of events," is to ignore historical moments when metaphor becomes metamorphosis. When, famously and in- famously, British soldiers kicked soccer balls into the German lines during World War I, this was something more or something less than a naive use of language. When the sports heroes from Harvard and Cornell signed up with Roosevelt-before Richard

Harding Davis and other Cuban war correspondents made such frequent use of the game trope-the athlete had become the soldier, the soldier the athlete, not only in fancy but in fact.

Yet, by pointing away from metaphor and toward metamorphosis, I do not mean, in turn, to ignore the way language can constitute experience, to make light of textual representations of culture (or, if you will, cultural representations of war and of play), to erase the significance of the very texts I am addressing.

the differences (real or imaginary) certainly pass unnoticed in the texts I'm dealing with. Furthermore, various anthropological attempts to define "sport" could generate the following sentences: "sport is play"; "sport is a form of play"; "sport includes play"; "sport is the opposite of play because it is work." See Kendall Blanchard and Alyce Taylor Cheska, The Anthropology of Sport: An Intro- duction (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1985), 40-60. And see, for a recent paradigmatic definition of sport, Guttmann, A Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 1-12.

8. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 32. Turner reviews other arguments in support of this position. For an opposing point of view, one that sees the distinction between work and play in the rudiments of Western culture- in the Homeric hymns and in Hesiod's Works and Days-see Mihai Spariosu, Literature, Mimesis, Play: Essays in Literary Theory (Tibingen: G. Narr, 1982), 16.




No doubt, the willingness of the college athlete to join Roosevelt in Cuba and the prevalence of the game trope within his military rhetoric cannot be explained in terms of one another, but require further, substantial explanation. Since the rather sudden rise of organized recreation in America, home of the work ethic, fairly well coincided with the rise of popular support for supracontinental expansion, one might argue that both military and recreational action provided relief, however illusory, from the increasing rationalization of life under corporate capitalism. But the argument does not obviate an inquiry into the ideological conditions for conflating ludic and bellic discourse. One such condition may be the congruence that occurs, in the early 1880s, between the bodily economy that informs the theorization of play-play as the object of knowledge in the child-study movement, for instance-and the market economy that informs the call for foreign expansion. In the economy borrowed from Herbert Spencer (who borrowed it from Schiller), play becomes the natural expression of excess en-

ergy. And, of course, the economic defense for securing the mar- kets of the Far East had been, at least since the age of Seward, that America must find some outlet for its surplus goods.9 Both expansion and play are represented as natural ways to cope with a

surplus, and thus the game trope in the imperialist rhetoric of the 1890s seems foremost to literalize the metaphor of the body poli- tic. Moreover, and more simply, despite Scarry's identification of war with work, the former does share with play the possibility of being opposed to work, to the degree that it arrests the individual's role in production: the call to war, in the canon of American Civil War poetry, is (among other things) a call away from work: "Row landward, lone fisher! stout woodman, come home! / Let smith leave his anvil and weaver his loom. .. ."10 More simply still,

9. In Herbert Spencer's formulation (suggesting a masturbatory model), "Play is equally an artificial exercise of powers which, in default of their natural exercise, become so ready to discharge that they relieve themselves by simulated actions in place of real actions" (The Principles of Psychology [New York: Appleton, 1873], 2: 630.) Spencer, like Freud, participates in the widespread tendency within nineteenth-century social science to describe human behavior according to the "energy model" borrowed from the physical sciences.

10. Edna Dean Proctor, "The Stripes and The Stars," Bugle-Echoes: A Collection of Poems of the Civil War, Northern and Southern, ed. Francis F. Browne (New York: White, Stokes, and Allen, 1886), 38. The theme appears throughout the volume.



58 Bill Brown

American football had become so violent, in the closing decades of the century, that it could share with war the content of injuring: as late as 1905, after repeated attempts to limit the violence of the

game, there were 18 deaths and 154 serious injuries during the

intercollegiate season.11 Economics, ideology, cultural practice- together these composed a multilayered foundation, a strong platform, from which the conflation of war and play could be voiced. A Century Magazine editorial, in 1884, could so ignore the

politics of that conflation, the politics of representation, as to ar-

gue that "mispresentation and falsehood are part of the game of war, and they are employed without compunction in politics."12

Cultural criticism has attended to the way sports metaphors, disguising violence, make war more comprehensible to a mass audience.13 In the hyperreality of late capitalism, we could say, a new reality-effect relies on the game paradigm: activities are real to the extent that they can be represented as games. But I would like to concentrate on a somewhat different cultural phenomenon, wherein war-or, more exactly, American imperialist activity, both military and economic-makes sports more comprehensible, integrating them into the mainstream of early twentieth-century society. In the texts I am dealing with, both of which portray baseball as essentially democratic, this "mainstream" actually splits into divergent visions-that of rational corporatism, on the one hand, and that of bourgeois individualism, on the other. Spalding presents baseball as a way of rationalizing the non-American or newly American world. Patten presents a baseball hero spectac- tularizing this world, preserving it as a sphere of adventure, the sphere of deep play, a realm of epic narrative possibility wherein

11. Allison Danzig, The History of American Football: Its Great Teams, Players and Coaches (Englewood: Prentice-Hall, 1956), 25.

12. "Military Morality," The Century Magazine 28, no. 1 (May 1884), 143. 13. See Donald J. Mrozek, "The Interplay of Metaphor and Practice in the U.S.

Defense Establishment's Use of Sport, 1940-1950,"Journal of American Culture 7, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1984): 54-59. The essay's importance lies in its location of the problem (usually discussed in relation to Wellington and Roosevelt) within the modern era of war. Note, however, that while the complexity of modern warfare may seem to require metaphoric simplification, it is, rather, the simplicity of war-the simplicity with which it gives "meaning" to life-that makes it the paradigmatic human condition in texts like those of William James.




"the soul's inner demand for greatness" can be fulfilled.'4 This

antagonism between the two presentations should be regarded as

part of a larger struggle over the social definition of sport, a

struggle for what Pierre Bourdieu has called "the monopolistic capacity to impose [on society] the legitimate definition of sporting practice,"'5 a struggle that takes place not only in political and educational arguments but also in history books and novels. These texts do not occupy the traditional (Lycurgan) discourse that privileges athletic training as military training; they hardly resemble the type of sports propaganda that first appeared, in modern times, as part of Friedrich Jahn's call for German liberation in the

early nineteenth century; 6 and yet they certainly do not, antithet-

ically, defend sport (or play) as an end in itself. In this respect, despite their simplicity, they mark a somewhat complex moment in the ideology of sport. The authors are interested not in defend-

ing the country, but in defending a game-defending it as more than a game, with the world at large asked to testify in behalf of that defense.

As though reacting to the popularity of football-a popularity which, critics and proponents agreed, depended on the at- traction to violence-Spalding's history insistently defines baseball with the equation: "Base Ball is War!" In contrast, for instance, to the "conventional, decorous" game of cricket, "Base Ball is in an Athletic Turmoil, played and applauded in an uncon- ventional, enthusiastic, and American manner."17 The equation

14. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 30. For an ethnographer's use of Bentham's concept of "deep play" ("play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all"), see Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 412-53.

15. Pierre Bourdieu, "Sport and Social Class," Social Science Information 17, no. 6 (1978): 826.

16. For a brief account (from a Frankfurt School perspective) of Jahn's work and its transformation within the Third Reich, see Bero Rigauer, Sport and Work, trans. Allen Guttmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 92-97.

17. Albert G. Spalding, America's National Game (New York: American Sports Publishing, 1911), 7. Further references will be provided in the text. While Spalding makes this equation explicitly, other writers (especially in the nineteenth century) make it implicitly: Henry Chadwick relies on military terminol-



60 Bill Brown

of war and baseball further depends on a long (and famous) proof that Abner Doubleday, graduate of West Point, hero of the Mexi- can War, the Seminole Wars, and the Civil War, was the man who, as a youth, invented the rules of modern baseball in 1839. In 1907, a national commission investigating the origins of the game found exactly what it sought: an individual American inventor, the sporting world's version of a Thomas Edison. "I can well understand," one member wrote, "how the orderly mind of the em-

bryo West Pointer would devise a scheme for limiting contestants on each side and allotting them to field positions, each with a certain amount of territory. .." (21). Simplistic as this under-

standing may seem, there appears to be an important historical relation between the game (the orderly mind's invention of the

orderly game) and the Civil War, which served as a mode of distribution for baseball, transforming it from a local into a national

pastime. And the condition of this delocalization was the existence of a highly codified set of rules, first committed to print by Alex- ander Cartwright in 1845 for the New York Knickerbocker Club. This is to say that, although it may have "received its baptism in the bloody days of our Nation's direst danger" (92), the game could do so only because, far from being warlike, it is rational, a set of measurements and rules, a transferable abstraction.

Recently and increasingly this is the point about modern sports that historians have emphasized: sports may provide some relief from routinized industrial society, but they also participate in that society's routine. As Richard Mandell argues, "sport not only eased but actually promoted the mental adaptation of the whole population to the demands of the modern world."18 This combination of relief from and adaptation to the modern world surfaces in Spalding's comments about the postwar era. Baseball, he says, was "the medium by which . . . a million warriors and

ogy throughout How to Play Base Ball (New York: A. G. Spalding, 1889). For a discussion of the baseball-war equation, which identifies its basis in the similarity between baseball and eighteenth-century warfare, see David Lamoreaux, "Base- ball in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Source of its Appeal,"Journal of Popu- lar Culture 11, no. 3 (1977): 597-613.

18. Richard D. Mandell, Sport: A Cultural History (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1984), 152.




their sons, from both belligerent sections, passed naturally, easily, gracefully from a state of bitter battling to one of perfect peace" (9). Despite the claim that baseball is "Athletic Turmoil," is "War," the narrative, like Murdock's essay, exhibits it functioning, more prominently, as a mode of pacification, part of the civilizing process, the transition from war to peace: "It calmed the restless spirits of men who, after four years of bitter strife, found themselves all at once in the midst of a monotonous era, with nothing at all to do" (92).

The professional baseball labor disputes of the 1880s Spald- ing again equates with war, casting himself as General Grant, the leader demanding absolute surrender from the rebellious ath- letes. But the war is fought in the name of peace, the peace of efficient capitalism. "Like every other form of business enterprise," he writes, "Base Ball depends for results upon two interde- pendent divisions, the one to have absolute control and direction of the system, and the other to engage-always under the execu- tive branch-in the actual work of production. The theory is as true in the production of the game of Base Ball as in the making of base balls or bats" (270). Far from envisioning the game as a scene for individual heroics, as an alternative to the industrial routine, Spalding sees the sport in a mirror of production: its success depends on rationality, bureaucracy, division of labor. Not surprisingly, the specular completion of the image appeared in the same year as Spalding's history: F. W. Taylor, in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), posits baseball as his example of how training, efficiency, and spirit create an ideal work force.19

The rationality of the game asserts itself throughout Spalding's chronicle of the First World's Tour of American Base- ball, when two teams of professional players toured the globe in the winter of 1888, demonstrating our national game. Even the raucousness of the players off the field, in his description of the "flight into Egypt," has its utilitarian point. The teams played "a game on the desert sands in front of the Great Pyramids, and near enough to use one for a backstop. Afterwards the whole company

19. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911), 12-13.



62 Bill Brown

was photographed en groupe on the Egyptian Sphinx, to the hor- ror of the native worshippers of Cheops and the dead Pharaohs" (258). Modern technology, embodied by the camera (which reproduces this image for the reader beside Spalding's written text), contrasts with the archaic irrationality of the imagined native su- perstitions. The players successfully transform an ancient monu- ment into something modern, useful, and American: a backstop. Baseball can be produced, the world's tour demonstrates, anywhere and under any circumstances, and the sport, just like the camera, becomes a medium for eliminating differences of time and space, for making the world familiar, reducing it to an Ameri- can global village.

Just as Murdock portrays Japan civilizing Truk with the American game, so too Spalding portrays the game as civilizing Japan: "It is no wonder... that this progressive island nation, whose people have been so quick to adopt American civilization, customs, business systems, manufacturing methods, should also grasp with avidity a form of pastime so peculiarly adapted to their alert, intelligent natures." The custom of baseball goes hand in hand with the custom of industrial capitalism. "It must be remem- bered," Spalding goes on to say, "that conditions in Japan are not favorable to the enjoyment of field sports by the masses." But, he adds, "Who may say that in the years to come Base Ball may not have liberated multitudes of the youth of that land from their conventional thralldom" (395-96). Here baseball, far from sub- limating political energy, may effect a revolution, transforming Japan into a modern democracy. We need not ask, with Umberto Eco, if it is "possible to have a revolution on a Football Sunday,"20 for we get a revolution and a game in one package, albeit a revolution as peaceful and rational as the game, a revolution, let us say, in the form of play therapy. This prophecy for Japan actually gives voice to a contemporaneous, official American vision-the endeavor, in the words of Francis Loomis (assistant secretary of state in 1903), "to Americanize the New World and perhaps the Old... not by manifestations of force, but rather by the dis-

20. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 172.




semination of those lofty, civilizing agencies."21 As a "civilizing agency," baseball can effect the teleological narrative because, as Spalding's first chapters assert, the game expresses our national principles and spirit. This "conquest" of Japan would serve as one of those ideal instances Roosevelt describes "where there has been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization."22 Radical change without conflict-this is Spalding's typical, rational ideal.

Both the dynamics of radical change without conflict and the dynamics of change succeeding conflict fall within Spalding's im-

perialist purview: one of the tasks of his history is to prove that baseball is the national game, and important evidence supporting that proof is that baseball has followed the flag: "It has followed the flag to the Hawaiian islands, and at once supplanted every other form of athletics in popularity. It has followed the flag to the Philippines, to Porto Rico and to Cuba, and wherever a ship flying the Stars and Stripes finds anchorage to-day, somewhere on near- by shore the American National Game is in Progress" (14). By 1911, for Spalding to defend baseball as an American game, he must define it as an imperialist game, one that Americanizes newly acquired territories: he concurs with an article, written "only a few years after the insurrection in Hawaii and the Spanish War," that insists that "the United States has no lands or tribes to con-

quer, [but] it is only to be expected that Base Ball ... will invade our new possessions" (374-75). In this version of imperialist histo-

ry, the act of waging baseball on Hawaii appears as a way of retain-

ing the primacy of conquest in the supposed absence of any mili-

tary infiltration. Despite my argument, then, that Spalding's text

suppresses the proclaimed violence of baseball, that violence returns amid the details of the supracontinental scene. But it returns with a very different emphasis: the point is not, as the text argues, that the playing of baseball is tumultuous, but rather that

21. Francis B. Loomis, The Position of the United States on the American Continent- Some Phases of the Monroe Doctrine (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1903), 19.

22. Theodore Roosevelt, African and European Essays (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1910), 115.



64 Bill Brown

the invasion of the sport, like the invasion of a military force, can transform an existing culture. And while, as Scarry would have it, "the severe discrepancy in the scale of consequences makes the comparison of war and gaming nearly obscene," attributing "a weight of motive and consequence" to games that they simply "cannot bear,"23 nonetheless such obscenity deserves to be thought through. For if waging baseball does not have as its essential content the injuring of bodies, it does, by imposing a dominant athletic code, involve the reorganization of bodies, the legit- imization of one bodily activity at the expense of others.

More simply, supplanting "every other form of athletics in popularity," baseball is at once a force that incorporates the Amer- ican possession and a sign of that possession's Americanness. At times, the invasion meets considerable resistance: the "Es- quimaux," for example, insist on breaking the rules, both as spectators and as players.24 But in Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico,

23. Scarry, Body in Pain, 81-84. 24. In this essay-a study of the "dominant" within cultural production-there

is no opportunity to discuss the actual practice of baseball and the subversive potential within sporting practice. C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary (1963; reprint, New York: Pantheon Books, 1983) merits especial consideration, though, as an analysis of "the intimate connection between cricket and West Indian social and political life" that accounts for the complexity of sport as a matrix for racial and class encounters. For an important discussion of the ideological valences of baseball in Japan, see Donald Roden, "Baseball and the Quest for National Dignity in Meiji Japan," American Historical Review 85, no. 3 (June 1980): 511-33. For some sense of an American's surprise at the way baseball is played in Cuba-that is, the way baseball (despite Spalding's hopes) does not so readily establish U.S. hegemony-see Thomas Boswell, "How Baseball Helps the Harvest or What the Bay of Pigs Did to the Bigs," in How Life Imitates the World Series: An Inquiry into the Game (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 81-96. For a brief examination of how sport serves a socializing function within American society, see Walter E. Schafer, "Sport and Youth Counterculture: Contrasting Socialization Themes," in Social Problems in Athletics: Essays in the Sociology of Sport, ed. Daniel M. Landers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 183-200. Finally, for a discussion of the relation between Spalding's ideas and those of the American organized play movement, see Peter Levine, A. G. Spalding and the Rise of American Baseball: The Promise of American Sport (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 110-11. It is important to understand that Spalding's ideal of democratizing or Americanizing a population ludically was anything but idio- syncratic. The game trope appears repeatedly, for instance, in John Dewey's work, as a way of "figuring" democracy; his mythical descriptions of play make it the realm in which the social appears completely natural: "Upon the playground, in game and sport, social organization takes place spontaneously and inevitably.




and Hawaii, "the games are conducted with systematic regard for the maintenance of good order." And that good order has economic benefits: "many Americans are finding winter employ- ment, both as coaches and players, while here and there the appearance of a Spanish name [in] the games played at home shows that first-class professionals are being developed in the islands" (378). For Spalding, the owner and manufacturer, Americaniza- tion has its obvious rewards. The progress of baseball-which is to

say its successful commodification and professionalization- institutes the progress of civilization, which in turn facilitates the

progress of baseball-the two narratives intertwine, slowly tying up the globe.

Significantly, I think, it is clear that the familiar neo-Marxist claim-that organized sport, rather than being a leisurely alternative to work, appears "long since to have become an aspect of the rationalization of labor" (to use Habermas's formulation)25-is a claim that sport itself made long ago, under the auspices of enthu- siasts like Spalding. The illusion that baseball, by providing a different temporality and a different potential for individual achievement, provides a pastoral or epic alternative to urban life (whether played in the nineteenth-century trolley park outside the city or the contemporary indoor stadium within the city) is an illusion Spalding's text simply will not entertain. The "otherness" of baseball disappears; its "sameness" justifies the game not only as an integral part of American modern industrial society, but also as a way of integrating the non-American world into this

society, a way of extinguishing all otherness, of homogenizing, of

hegemonizing. But in the same historical moment, Gilbert Patten's baseball

novels (published under the pseudonym Burt L. Standish) reas- sert that otherness: the sport functions not to rationalize society,

There is something to do, some activity to be carried on, requiring natural divisions of labor, selection of leaders and followers, mutual cooperation and emulation" (The School and Society: Being Three Lectures [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899], 28). In Twenty Years at Hull House, With Autobiographical Notes ([New York: Macmillan Co., 1938], 441-45), Jane Addams discusses the "power of orderly recreation" and the "standardization of pleasures" in her work with immigrant children.

25. Quoted by Rigauer, Sport and Work, 39.



66 Bill Brown

to socialize the individual, but to provide opportunity for irrational, individualistic success. His juvenile sports fiction was a publishing phenomenon comparable only to Horatio Alger's, and, indeed, shortly after Frank Merriwell appeared in 1896, he became more popular than the Alger hero. This is because, the argument usually goes, the rags-to-riches myth was simply untenable by the close of the century: "Alger's theory, that opportunity lay every- where, was obsolete, and American boys knew it";26 hard work and a bit of good luck had become superfluous to the recipe for success. In the Merriwell novels, the locus of success shifts en- tirely: the objective is no longer achievement within the capitalist system, but success outside the system-on the baseball diamond, on the football field, on the track, in the woods outside the walls of the school, in Peru. The "ambition to grow up 'spectable,"27 to

26. Russel B. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial Press, 1971), 71.

27. Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick, or, Street Life in New York (1868), Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 131. Patten himself-a high-school dropout turned factory worker, turned author (at the age of sixteen)-succeeds within the "rational" system by writing against it. Phrased differently, Merriwell's escape from routinized society serves as the antipode to Patten's own confinement within the system, his occupation as the alienated writer whose plots and characters were presented to him by his publishers. In 1896, the year the series began, Ormond Smith presented Patten with his outline:

After the first twelve numbers, the hero is obliged to leave the academy, or takes it upon himself to leave. It is essential that he should come into a considerable amount of money at this period. When he leaves the academy he takes with him one of his professor's servants, a chum. In fact any of the characters you have introduced and made prominent in the story. A little love element would also not be amiss, though this is not particularly important.

When the hero is once projected on his travels there is an infinite variety of incident to choose from ....

After we run through twenty or thirty numbers of this, we would bring the hero back and have him go to college-say, Yale University; thence we could take him on his travels again to the South Seas or anywhere.

If you can do the opening stories of school life, you will be able to do them all as we shall assist you in the matter of local color or the stories of travel.

This letter will, of course, be held as confidential. Reproduced by Quentin James Reynolds, The Fiction Factory (New York: Random House, 1955), 66-67.




read and write, to secure a job as counting-room clerk at ten dollars a week-such ambition pales beside Merriwell's will to

power on and off the playing fields. He does enjoy spectacular financial success, but this, like his education at Yale, appears as an achievement that is really beside the point; his self-realization on the ball field-an arena for democracy where education and wealth don't come into play-is what counts: "In athletics

strength and skill win," he says, in Frank Merriwell at Yale, "regard- less of money or family." Indeed, the text insists that athletics have democratized the university: "The democratic spirit at Yale came

mainly from athletics.... [The] poorest man in the university stood a show of becoming the lion and idol of the whole body of

young men."28 The obvious appeal of success that depends on

personal resources alone, not social distinction, is made all the more appealing by a fictional star whose resources never run dry, whose muscles never tire. The perfect body, doing what it wants where it wants, makes a visionary leap beyond Alger's secularized Protestant ethic.

And just as sport is envisioned as eliminating the last constraints on individual aspiration, so too the fictional sports hero can eliminate such constraints in the nonsporting world, in "the

game of life," as the Social Darwinists began to call it.29 All of Merriwell's adventures have the structure of a game, but they are not all games: he fights local villains, breaks up strikes, succeeds on Wall Street, and, doing so, attracts a large following of dedi- cated admirers. But all of the exploits are pursued, the narrator assures us, only "for the love of adventure." Merriwell is the charismatic hero, the charismatic leader par excellence, rejecting "as undignified any pecuniary gain that is methodical and rational," rejecting "all rational economic conduct."30 Of course, the

28. Gilbert S. Patten, Frank Merriwell at Yale (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1903), 260.

29. Arguing against the American notion that there are such things as natural and universal rights, William Graham Sumner concludes that rights should only be thought of as "rules of the game of social competition which are current here and now" (Essays of William Graham Sumner, ed. Albert G. Keller and Maurice R. Davie [New Haven: Yale, 1934], 1: 361-62).

30. Max Weber, "The Sociology of Charismatic Authority," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Girth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford



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paradoxes that accompany this heroism are legion: charisma is commodified, available for ten cents a hit in the form of the dime novel; identification with the hero who escapes the confines of society depends on buying into the system that creates that confinement; the thrill of athletic action must be passively consumed; the thrill of the irrational, rationally read. The genre of sports fiction, like the sports page, like the capitalist system itself, thrives on the mass production and distribution of such alterity.31

I do not mean to suggest that Patten never attempts to legitimize athletics on noncharismatic grounds, to transform the world of play into a world of industry. But the very peculiarities of the transformation attest to the single-mindedness of his "charismatic vision." In Frank Merriwell's Book of Athletic Development-which is not so much a "how to" as a "why to"-the author inscribes industrial efficiency within the individual athletic body: "the human body is a great workshop where unceasing labor and activity is

University Press, 1946), 21. To conclude, as most considerations of this fiction have, that "Merriwell's philosophy and value system are rigidly conventional," that "Patten's values were always those of a conventional moralizer" (Christian K. Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner [New York: Columbia, 1981], 170), is, I think, to credit Street and Smith's ads for the novels, along with Patten's expressed agenda, at the fiction's expense. For these conventional boys' novels are not simply conventional; they expose the rival conventions that trouble the ideology of sport and the ideology of democracy- at the very least, the rivalry between the individual and the system. Frank may not drink or smoke, but, in the spirit of a college adventure, he will steal, and his paying for the stolen goods does not negate the initial thrill of transgression. When it comes to settling a personal dispute, he breaks almost any high-school or college rule, transgressing adult authority, establishing "fair play" as a moral sine qua non, which means taking the law into one's own hands, substituting a game ethic for established law and order. The parallel charismatic hero of adult popular fiction in this period is Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902).

31. Amusement parks are an especially good example of how this alterity is distributed for consumption. As Tony Bennett writes about the rides at Black- pool, "it is an assimilated otherness that is on offer, an already recuperated and tamed fantastic" ("A Thousand and One Troubles: Blackpool Pleasure Beach," Formations of Pleasure, ed. Tony Bennett et al. [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983], 153). However, as Kathy Lee Peiss has cogently argued in her study of the recreational scene for American working-class women at the turn of the century, "Leisure activities may affirm cultural patterns embedded in other in- stitutions, but they may also offer an arena for the articulation of different values and behaviors" (Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the- Century New York [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986], 4).




going on from birth to death," Patten writes-the heart is an

engine, the brain a superintendent, the nerves telephone wires, the lungs a "market place, or exchange, where two merchants, the blood and the air, meet to exchange their wares."32 Once the rational system has been located within the athlete (and not the athlete within the system), developing the body in isolation (which, for Patten, means simply swimming, wrestling, and playing ball) becomes a way of maintaining a proper division of labor and

proper market exchange; the relationship of oneself to oneself embodies all socioeconomic relations. "How much more calamitous," Patten writes at the outset of the book, "is the physical decay and degeneration of a people than is any commercial or financial disaster that may befall them" (10); but once the capitalist system has been internalized, bodily development, in the form of

play, can regenerate the commercial world, the world of work. Within this text, the ethical subject is a bodily subject, and the

problems of the world can be solved by individuals in isolation; moreover, the history of the world moves according to the exploits of designated athlete-heroes: Cromwell, Napoleon, Roosevelt, and America's finest athlete, Washington (141).

In Frank Merriwell in Peru, again, the hero's personal adventures, though pursued only in "the spirit of adventure," promote the success of the American system, but the thrill of the story comes from watching Frank outside the rational limits of that

system, from the spectacularity of his personal success. Still, an

imperialist economy would seem to account for Merriwell's very appearance in Peru in 1911, an appearance satisfying the discur- sive demands of the genre. By this I mean only that, as the arche-

typal adventure hero-the hero whose nobility "is statically inert," in Bakhtin's words,33 the hero whose character does not change- Merriwell must constantly change location, traveling farther and farther to find new outlets for his nobility. The cheap production and fast consumption of the novels meant generating episodes ad infinitum-Patten wrote over two hundred novels in all-and

32. Patten, Frank Merriwell's Book of Athletic Development (New York: Street and Smith, 1901), 49.

33. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 392.



70 Bill Brown

once Frank had pitched the winning pitch and hit the winning run in crucial game after crucial game, at both Fardale Academy and Yale, he necessarily moved to Wall Street, to the American South, to the West.34 But exhausting the American frontier (as the Turner thesis would have it) meant finding new frontiers abroad, new ground for the pioneer spirit.35

And in the first decade of the century, popular imagination had sighted Peru as just such ground. America had a firmly established "literary relationship" with Peru since William Prescott's

publication of the History of the Conquest of Peru in 1847, a history that provides Patten's novel with stock details: Spanish malev- olence, buried Incan gold, a depressed Indian population.36 As

34. Frank's biography, then, serves as a rather exact fictional expression of Hobson's theory that sport creates a desire for aggression that must ultimately be fulfilled outside the sports arena. Similarly, when Frank's carefully cloned brother, Dick, travels to Europe, the athlete's "animal lust of struggle" (as Veblen and Hobson would have it), in the absence of an athletic contest, must find its outlet in a "good fight": one of Dick's companions gives voice to this bodily economy by commenting that "to [Dick] a good fight is the breath of life. If he goes a whole day without a fight he loses flesh and becomes a whole lot downcast" (Dick Merriwell Abroad, or, Seeing the World [New York: Street and Smith, 1904], 247).

35. The idea that new possessions or colonies might provide an outlet for youthful aggression is clearly not an idea that only appears in fiction. In his Essai sur la colonisation (Paris, 1907), Carl Siger argues that "the new countries offer a vast field for individual, violent activities which, in metropolitan countries, would run up against certain prejudices, against a sober and orderly conception of life, and which, in the colonies, have greater freedom to develop and, consequently, to affirm their worth. Thus to a certain extent the colonies serve as a safety valve for modern society. Even if this were their only value, it would be immense" (quoted by Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism [1955], trans. Joan Pinkham [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968], 20). The correlation between Siger's argument and the more typical economic argument for expansion makes it clear that the "safety valve" homology cannot be thought of as nationally specific.

36. Prescott generalizes this apathy, but he is particularly concerned with Atahuallpa's despondent reaction to the Spanish invaders: "But his countenance exhibited neither the fierce passions nor the sagacity which had been ascribed to him; and, though in his bearing he showed a gravity and a calm consciousness of authority well becoming a king, he seemed to discharge all expression from his features, and to discover only the apathy so characteristic of the American races" (William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru: With a Preliminary View of the Civilization of the Incas [New York: American Publishers, 1847], 1: 290). The "hopeless despair" of the Indian becomes "hereditary" in the Prescott tradition: his "countenance is usually clouded with a look of profound melancholy, the indel- ible stamp of centuries of intolerable oppression" (Sir Clements Markham, A History of Peru [Chicago: C. H. Sergel, 1892], 454). In the Patten novel, of course, this despondency serves to emphasize Frank's boundless energy and cheer.




the century proceeded, interest in that ancient drama gave way to interest in an economic drama of the future: in 1903, the annual

meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, addressing the topic of "The United States and Latin America," emphasized the possibilities for dramatic returns on capital investment: "untold natural resources . . . await only capital and enter-

prise," one speaker proclaimed; "one may well wonder what other treasures may not lie still hidden in those virgin forests waiting to be wrested from nature."37 The geographic shift from North to South invokes a temporal shift to an earlier America, the America of the Robber Barons, even America as virgin land. Of course, this

imperialist vision of a temporal return typifies American turn-of-

the-century frontier nostalgia, which expressed itself in the wilderness cult, primitivism, and, in 1910, the founding of the Amer- ican Boy Scout movement.38 The significant idiosyncrasy of the vision, however, lies in its translation of the frontier spirit into the

capitalist spirit, its translation of the pioneer into the entrepreneur. In A Guide to Modern Peru (1908), speculative investment assumes the character of spectacle: "Peru is the most talked of nation in South America today.... The Vanderbilts, the Hearst estate and other New York financiers have over ten million dollars invested in the Cerro de Pasco mines of Peru alone, the richest

copper and silver mines in the world"; an Ohio mining company has "purchased eleven gold mines in what is supposed to be the ancient gold fields of the Incas."39 Corporate investment becomes a childhood adventure, the search for buried gold.

Frank, in accordance with such translation, teaches his tight- fisted New England sidekick the lesson of speculation: "Some- times it actually seems that the more a man spends the more he has. It's not always the one who sticks close by the old homestead

37. Loomis, Position of the United States on the American Continent, 81, 64. 38. See Roderick Nash's chapter on "The Wilderness Cult" in Wilderness and the

American Mind, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 141-60. Lamoreaux establishes an intriguing intimacy between the increasing popularity of baseball and the late-century longing for the frontier: "With its geometrical exactitude-its bases and basepaths-the infield becomes an abstract symbol of the civilized portions of the country. The outfield, on the other hand, with its theoretically illimitable reach and its relative lack of spatial definition, suggests the frontier" (598).

39. Adolfo de Clairmont, A Guide to Modern Peru (Ohio, 1908), 41.



72 Bill Brown

and works the hardest who makes the most money."40 Spending without reserve becomes a way of destabilizing the economic world, transforming it into a world of play, unreasonable and unproductive, where the gambling spirit can provoke a constant state of excitation over and against reified society.41 The very danger of such speculation, the irrationality of the risk, provides the thrill. Gambling, Merriwell's only vice, enables him to experience the aleatory on and off the ball field. Two thrilling moments in the novel merit especial attention, exhibiting the sports hero's prowess first in the military sphere, then in the industrial sphere. Both have the character of conquests, but beneficent, American conquests, untainted by Pizarro's brutality and deceit.

The military episode, opening the novel, actually takes place in Central America, in the "Republic of Tampano," and all that we see of Merriwell's heroics are the accolades he receives for having restored democracy to the country. "An uprising of the people against the tyrannical government of Lorenzo Matamore," Patten writes, "had resulted in the overthrow of the dictator, and the election of the conquering general, Leon Gomez, to the presiden- cy." Frank, "who happened to be in Tampano at the time of the revolution . . . had been largely instrumental in bringing success to the insurgent arms," and the newly elected president Gomez gives "this young American full credit for the successful outcome of the revolution." The president decorates the American youth with the badge of Loyal Legion and offers him monetary rewards, land, mining interests, all of which the hero declines, content that the despot Matamore has been prevented from turning "the country into a place of serfdom and slavery" (5-19).

But Merriwell's political platitudes hardly negate the fact that his volunteer action, mimicking the adventures of Roosevelt's Rough Riders, provides, first and foremost, the opportunity to display in the military sphere all the strategy he has learned from playing baseball. Indeed, his action seems to be the ideal example

40. Patten, Frank Merriwell in Peru, or, In the Land of the Incas (New York: Street and Smith, 1910), 65. (Further references will be provided in the text.)

41. See Georges Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-39, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitts, and David M. Leslie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116-29.




for the lesson Roosevelt, in the same year, reports having taught the captain of the Harvard crew team, when the youth joined him in Cuba two weeks after graduating: "I endeavored to instil into him, that while winning a boat race was all very well, to take part in a victorious fight, in a real battle, was a good deal better."42 In both texts, military engagement satisfies, above all, a personal quest for excitement. The fight, Roosevelt's "real battle," could take place anywhere, under any political circumstances, and thus, what Michael Oriard calls the "apolitical, asocial, even timeless, placeless quality of the athletic contest" becomes a quality of war.43 By having the hero settle the conflict in Tampano just before the arrival of the U.S. Marines, Patten's narrative sustains its emphasis on the "manly" American individual, as opposed to the American government or the American military system. One of Merriwell's American comrades in battle gives voice to the em-

phasis: "It's lucky this cruiser didn't arrive any earlier, for . . . the United States marines . . might have interfered and made it rather unpleasant for General Gomez when he came sailing into the capital shooting things up generally. Now there's no real reason whatever for the landing of men. ... There ain't nobody in no danger, and if they land marines from that ship they'll simply be butting in where they have no real reason to butt" (20). The marines would interfere with what the paramilitary American individual can accomplish, a scenario that has given us, more re-

cently, figures like Rambo and Oliver North. The world becomes, for the baseball hero, a theater of strenuousness, and the marines threaten to close that theater down.44

42. Roosevelt, African and European Essays, 146. The same advice can be found in Baden-Powell's Aids to Scouting: "Football is a good game, but better than it, better than any other game, is that of man-hunting" (quoted by Hobson, Imperi- alism, 214).

43. Michael V. Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), 26-27.

44. Ironically, given the fact that the novel censures Pizarro's conquest, Frank repeats what were, for Prescott, the fundamental errors that gave rise to heinous crime-the absence of government support, and the conquerors' conception of the conquest as an adventure, a game: "[Had] their conquest been achieved under the immediate direction of the government, the interests of the natives would have been more carefully protected .... But, as it was, the affair of reducing the country was committed to the hands of irresponsible individuals, soldiers



74 Bill Brown

The final, very long Peruvian episode of the novel pits Frank

against Joaquin el Diablo, a daredevil bandit from Romano, who has been hired to prevent the completion of a railroad line to Chuma, a railroad financed by an American entrepreneur. Here too, the text reiterates a contemporaneous narrative of international conflict, but with an emphasis that never veers from the American individual. The Peruvian rail system had been an international focus of attention since 1890, when the government (after successive losses in the Chilean nitrate wars) satisfied its for-

eign debt by ceding state railways, land, and colonization grants to the London-based Peruvian Corporation. Increasingly, the

capitalist gaze viewed commercial progress in all of South Amer- ica as part and parcel of a global process: "The railway development of South America," one expert suggested, "is really in its infancy, and there remains to be accomplished work that will keep engineers and capitalists busy for more than a century. The reward will be great, for a continent that will easily support 800,000,000 people, a continent of surpassing natural wealth, is to be exploited in the interest of progressive civilization."45

For the hero of our story, it is not the progress of civilization, but the success of the individual, his fellow American, that in-

spires him to fight, without financial reward, against el Diablo's interference. "Naturally," Frank says about the railway enterprise, "I should wish for its success, in order that this countryman of mine who has ventured to invest his money here might not meet with financial loss" (247). Frank's adventure, according to this formula, serves to protect the adventure of the venture capitalist, a latter-day version of Henry Meiggs, the engineer who began building the famous Oroya railroad in 1867, floating $27 million worth of bonds along the way. Frank himself finally rides a loco- motive through barricades and walls of fire, and, of course, he defeats el Diablo in hand-to-hand combat. Protecting the progress

of fortune, desperate adventurers, who entered on conquest as a game, which they were to play in the most unscrupulous manner, with little care but to win it" (History of the Conquest of Peru, 2: 177). Of course, Frank is represented as both responsible and scrupulous.

45. Percy F. Martin, Peru of the Twentieth Century (New York: Longmans, Green, 1911), 229.




of the rail system, he nonetheless escapes the advance of civilization by entering the "rather lively business" (188) of fighting "un- civilized" peoples on their own terms.

The natives themselves remain unimpressed by the train controversy. A local official explains to Frank that the people of Chuma feel indifferent about the railroad because "they realize that Chuma, having no industries of special importance, may not be especially benefited by the railroad. They know it is the inten- tion of the company to push the road onward beyond their town, and it is plain that many of them are not favorable toward the line" (246). Here, the fictional production of the Peruvian scene reproduces a typical American aggravation-native ingratitude: "the inhabitants have shown themselves absolutely indifferent to the advantages the railway offers as a cheap and expeditious means of transportation," Percy Martin reports, in Peru of the Twentieth Century; "the Indians cling slavishly to their primitive method of animal transaction . . . while even among the wealthy Peruvians the existence of the railway is persistently ignored."46

But the novel casts this accusation of ignorance and stupidity in light of its own project, the defense of adventuresome athletic prowess. The people of Chuma, the explanation goes on, "say they have lived in peace without a railroad, which will cause them much annoyance.... The whistling of the locomotives at midday will disturb their siesta." Of course, living in peace is the very antithesis of the Merriwell definition of life: "'What a terrible thing!"' laughed Merriwell. "'All that some of these people seem to think about is sleeping and eating and leading the laziest existence possible"' (246). Throughout the novel, the racial distinction between the conquering Americans and the American aborigines-a difference between activity and passivity-prepares for this moment, in which "civilization" finds its opposite in "sloth": once "the most highly civilized and intelligent people to be found in all South America," the Incans have "degenerated into common, ordinary, lazy, worthless creatures" (35); the "Cajon" is reported to be "naturally listless and indifferent ... naturally slothful and disinclined to overexert himself" (154). The point to be made is not so much

46. Ibid., 200.



76 Bill Brown

that the racist novel is racist, but that it attempts to naturalize its racism by differentiating inherent listlessness from inherent liveli- ness. In Patten's text, industrial progress ultimately signifies physical prowess and venturesome spirit, individual and racial; heroism and imperialism depend on a shared bodily economy.

"In these prosaic times men have little chance to become heroes," a middle-aged professor laments in another Patten novel.47 But Patten himself writes the prose out of modern times while his hero, a hero of great conflicts, ultimately makes the world more prosaic, bringing those conflicts to a close, inflicting modern American peace and industry. The rivalry I've established- between a text that presents sport as civilizing and organizational and a text that presents sport as individualist and heroic-is a rivalry embodied by the Merriwell story itself and, likewise, by Spalding's history, which, despite its general emphasis, strives to

preserve the tumultuous and the heroic.48 Spalding and Patten

may be rendered compatible, moreover, by recognizing that the

apparently opposed emphases fit into a shared logic, what I'm inclined to call a dialectic of imperial conquest: because conquest itself remains the ideal state of affairs-in which, while civilization

spreads, the hero "comes to be"-there must always be new con-

quest, further conquest, beyond the bounds of modernity. (Capital- ism and romantic anticapitalism find themselves resolved, so long as the conquest proceeds.) This vision of sporting practice relies on the non-American world as the testing ground for the national

47. Patten, Dick Merriwell Abroad, 7. Dick is Frank's long-lost brother, suddenly found and followed as a means of generating new novels with the same episodes but a "different" hero.

48. This dynamic between the modern and the heroic remains a part of baseball history, of course. Warren Susman-examining the two obituaries of Babe Ruth printed by the New York Times in 1947, one a list of facts and figures, the other a sentimental, impassioned biography-suggests that the publication re- flects both "a particular middle-class delight in what could be counted and mea- sured" and the demand for something more than the mensurational. Ruth, he concludes, "was a heroic producer in the mechanized world of play. He was also an ideal hero for the world of consumption" (Culture as History: The Transforma- tion of American Society in the Twentieth Century [1973; reprint, New York: Pantheon Books, 1983], 141-49). For an overview of the dynamic between modernism and antimodernism in American intellectual history of the privileged class, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).




game's success, just as the non-American world had been viewed, by the close of the century, as the testing ground for both our national "manliness" and our national economic and political systems.

That this dialectic should surface from the juxtaposition of a baseball history and the nonsporting adventures of a baseball hero may say something about the specificity of the game of baseball (as opposed to football, for instance, Roosevelt's privileged college sport). Oscillations between peace and frenzy, between an emphasis on individual conflict (pitcher-batter) and an emphasis on the larger human system (fielding), between heroic indepen- dence and the hero's dependence on the team-these begin to tell us something about the structural impositions of the game, or, better, its structural resolution of highly charged antipodes that find themselves textually resolved, all over again, within the imperialist ideologeme of Spalding's and Patten's texts. Of course, structurally, the game resembles cricket above all, which similarly imposes, in the words of C. L. R. James, "the fundamental relation of the One and the Many, Individual and Social, Individual and Universal, leader and followers, representative and ranks, the

part and the whole."49 (For the professional baseball player, this fundamental relation was most concretely manifested in the relation between the worker and the corporation, the player and the owner, labor and "organized baseball." Legal battles over the "reserve clause," binding the player to the team, began in the 1880s, and these were resolved only after the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, which precipitated the appointment of a baseball commissioner as sole arbitrator of disputes. The result of the appointment, which had wide popular support from fans and the press, was that the individual player, subject to adjudication within the baseball system, was denied his rights within the American legal system-he could win a case in court and still be expelled from professional baseball, for "the good of the game." The Universal had triumphed.)50

This claim for cricket, from Beyond a Boundary (1963)-which

49. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary, 193. 50. See Norman L. Rosenberg, "Here Comes the Judge! The Origins of Base-

ball's Commissioner System and American Legal Culture," Journal of Popular Culture 20, no. 4 (1987): 129-46.



78 Bill Brown

remains the most cogent historical analysis of the sociopolitics of a

sport-actually appears just where the sociopolitical disappears, in a chapter James devotes to defending the sport as an art, to

answering the "most fundamental" question about cricket: "What is it?" To fuss about the way this chapter suddenly privileges the

ontological and phenomenological at the expense of the political would be to misconstrue James's project and to object unfairly to his passion for the game, voiced in this chapter above all. Besides which, the consideration of the aesthetics of a game recalls its inverse: the appearance of "game" and "play" in the history of Western aesthetics, from Kant to Derrida. Schiller's Aesthetic Let- ters, for example, where the Spieltrieb mediates between a sensuous drive and a formal drive, reconciling change and identity, being and becoming, can foreground for us the intellectual work that

"play" has accomplished, as arbitrator and mediator. To move from philosophy to anthropology, sociology to cultural history, is to watch "play," both as a concept and as an activity, engage one antithesis after another. And that engagement is a resolution to the degree that "play" structurally holds the antitheses together, liberating their interaction-their play, if you will. What, then, of the specificity of the texts, the game, and the history I've been

discussing? By the turn of the eighteenth century, "play," on and off the field, becomes available as a modus operandi (in the rise of modern sport and the publication of Kant's third Critique) that can resolve the irresolvable-subject and object, particular and universal, violence and nonviolence, freedom and conformity.51 That baseball, in the succeeding century, appears as one manifestation of this mode should surprise no one; that this manifestation participates in the American imperialist gaze is something we should continue to find surprising.

51. My chronology for, and much of my understanding of, the "rise of modern sport" derives from Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement.



Documents

Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American Imperialism