| To Give Good Sport: The Economic Culture of Sporting Leisure in Early America, 1750-1850 traces the evolving economic and social relationships between investors, professional performers and managers, and attendees at an array of public sporting activities including horse races, cockfights, billiard matches, and theater performances. The project argues that these unpredictable settings loaded with connotations of “play” and “sport” were central sites for the construction of a democratic white male polity even as they entrenched wealthy Americans’ economic and political power.;By relating financial records that detail the process of staging these events to reports on the social experience of attending them, this project reveals how investors failed to win deference in colonial sporting settings, and later trained their sights on maximizing their economic return from these venues. This shift toward pursuing profit instead of deference-inducing exclusivity required a concession of social and cultural authority in order to consolidate economic control. The result was the transformation of sporting activities into mass culture events, commercial entertainments which were controlled by elite investors but afforded almost all white men the opportunity to prove themselves in refined “genteel” or rough “physical” settings. The challenge to prove equality and superiority in accessible indiscriminate sporting settings proved so popular and seductive that investors extended it to American political culture. They had incorporated sporting events into political rallies for decades, but sporting events actually provided a model for organizing and mobilizing the “mass parties” of the antebellum era. By 1850, American political parties, like American sporting industries, were run by elite investors standing behind the scenes of a negotiated white male social experience. Sporting events and their influence on American political culture had strengthened inequalities of power and wealth while laying the foundation for a tradition of democratic dissent and contest. |
