LEVEL PLAYING FIELDS: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF AMATEUR SPORT IN

381 Pages·2006·1.5 MB·English

by  Steve Ely

LEVEL PLAYING FIELDS:
THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF AMATEUR SPORT IN PENNSYLVANIA

by
W. CURTIS MINER
B.A., INDIANA UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1984
M.A., UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, 1989

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh

2006
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented

by

W. Curtis Miner

It was defended on
11/20/2006
and approved by
Kathleen M. Blee, Professor, Department of Sociology
Laurence Glasco, Associate Professor, Department of History
Van Beck Hall, Associate Professor, Department of History
Dissertation Advisor: Edward K. Muller, Professor, Department of History

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Copyright © by W. Curtis Miner
2006
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Level Playing Fields: The Democratization of Amateur Sport in Pennsylvania
W. Curtis Miner, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2006

This dissertation examines how amateur sports once dominated and controlled by Pennsylvania’s
Leisure Class became accessible to non-elites over the course of the twentieth century. Rising
standards of living and increased leisure time were pre-requisites for broader public
participation. But this study argues that the democratization of amateur sport depended on the
active intervention of the state and, to a lesser extent, the market, both of which broadened
access to privately controlled playing fields. In hunting, state game management restored wild
game populations, thus ensuring a bountiful supply of game for all Pennsylvanians, irrespective
of social class. Likewise, the first municipally owned golf courses, often situated in public
parks, offered the only alternative to the private courses which up to that point dominated the
game and regulated participation. Finally, the market-driven demand for new sources of
“football material” on college campuses opened opportunities for working-class student athletes,
most of whom were recruited and subsidized by wealthy alumni.

Many of these changes were set in motion by elites acting in their own self interest. Over
time, though, the democratization of amateur sports became a goal in itself. During the 1910s,
the state game commission shifted its emphasis from game propagation and game law
enforcement to the acquisition of public game lands, a policy focus which benefited hunters
without access to private property. In golf, a second wave of municipal courses, many billed as
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“people’s country clubs” and fortified by federal money, were designed to be accessible to the
greatest number of people, and without the membership restrictions which obtained at many
early public courses.

While the social composition of amateur sports continued to expand after World War II,
the market played an increasingly more visible role in that process, as evinced by growth of
semi-public golf courses and the increased prevalence of leased or privately owned hunting
grounds. Elites frequently responded to the “crowding of the playing fields” by retreating or
refortifying boundaries within these same sports.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.......................................................................................................IX
1 INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................1
2 JOINING THE CHASE: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF SPORT HUNTING IN
PENNSYLVANIA..............................................................................................................25
2.1 Sport and Subsistence: The Social Basis of Hunting in Nineteenth-Century
Pennsylvania........................................................................................................30
2.2 Gentlemen Sportsmen and Private Game Preserves in Pennsylvania...........38
2.3 Game Laws and Social Class: The Early Years of The Pennsylvania Game
Commission, 1895 - 1909....................................................................................47
2.4 Preserving Hunting for the People: The Pennsylvania Game Commission
and the Promotion of Public Hunting, 1909 - 1919..........................................59
2.5 From Sanctuaries to Shooting Grounds: The Evolution of Public Game
Lands, 1919-1939................................................................................................74
2.6 “A Veritable Army of Annihilation”: The Increase in Recreational Hunters
and the Democratization af Sport Hunting, 1915-1940...................................87
2.7 The Working Man’s Hunting Club: Industrial Workers as Sport Hunters.95
3 OPEN FAIRWAYS : THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF GOLF IN PENNSYLVANIA.
............................................................................................................................................109
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3.1 The Upper Four Hundred and the Front Nine: Golf and Pennsylvania’s
Social Elites, 1887-1920....................................................................................113
3.2 Landscaped Parks and the Origins of the Municipal Golf Movement, 1895-
1915.....................................................................................................................133
3.3 Expanding the Fairways: Golf Reaches Out to the Masses, 1915-1925......149
3.4 “The People’s Country Clubs”: The Democratization of Public Golf and the
Second Generation of Municipal Links..........................................................159
3.5 Golf’s New Deal: The Great Depression, the WPA and Municipal Golf....175
3.6 Blue-Collar Titlists: The Amateur Public Links Golf Championship, 1922-
1939.....................................................................................................................184
3.7 The Golfing Steelworker: Andy Szwedko and the 1939 Amateur Public
Links Championship.........................................................................................192
4 GRIDIRONS AND IRON MEN: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF COLLEGE
FOOTBALL IN PENNSYLVANIA................................................................................196
4.1 Manly Brahmins: The Leisure Class, “Strenuousity” and College Football..
............................................................................................................... 203
4.2 Gridirons and Local Elites: College Football at the University of Pittsburgh,
1904-1918...........................................................................................................215
4.3 “Stadiumitis,” the Commercialization of College Football and the Search for
“Football Material”..........................................................................................225
4.4 Noblesse Oblige and Football Farms: Private Prep Schools and the
Cultivation of Working-Class Athletes, 1915-1930........................................232
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4.5 Steel Town High: Public High Schools and Western Pennsylvania Industrial
Communities as Sources of Football Material...............................................249
4.6 Linking Supply With Demand: Systematic Recruiting and the
Democratization of College Football...............................................................272
4.7 Financing Supply: The Subsidization of Working-Class Athletes and the
Democratization of College Football...............................................................285
4.8 Bohunkus College: Democratization and the “New Ethnology” of College
Football during the 1930s.................................................................................292
5 EPILOGUE: FROM STATE TO MARKET: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF
SPORT AND RECREATION IN PENNSYLVANIA AFTER WORLD WAR II.....299
5.1 Semi-Publics and Industrial Courses: Private Sector Approaches to Public
Golf.....................................................................................................................303
5.2 Co-Ops and Clubs: The Public-Private Dimensions of Postwar Hunting.315
5.3 Working-Class “Professionals,” Upper-Class Amateurs: The Social
Bifurcation of College Football........................................................................327
5.4 Conclusion........................................................................................................339
BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................................................345
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I began graduate school as a traditional student but re-entered and now exit as a “non-traditional”
one. I’ve accumulated debts on both ends, and in the middle. First thanks go to my committee
members, Kathleen Blee, Larry Glasco and Van Beck Hall, for offering timely and constructive
comment on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I’m also appreciative of the many other faculty at
the University of Pittsburgh who over the years have provided encouragement and insight.
Maurine Greenwald’s steady hand guided me through several critical stages of both my masters
and doctorate program; I’m grateful to her for setting high standards and helping me achieve
them. Hugh Kearney was the consummate gentleman and scholar; I feel honored to have been
able to study with him during the last part of his long and productive career on this side of the
Atlantic. Gene Levy at Carnegie Mellon and Roy Lubove of Pitt’s School of Social Work, now
both deceased, deepened my appreciation for Pittsburgh’s past; the study of regional history has
been diminished by their absence.

It feels strange to refer to Ken Heineman and Bill Warren as my fellow graduate students;
both are now tenured professors. They remained true friends long after we vacated our
respective cubicles in old Forbes Quad and I appreciate the encouragement they’ve give me in
the final stretch. I’d also like to thank the many museum colleagues I’ve worked with over the
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past 20 years who have since become friends, especially Paul Roberts and Brian Butko at the
Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; Dan Ingram and Richard Burkert at the Johnstown
Area Heritage Association; Carmen DiCiccio of the America’s Industrial Heritage Project and
now adjunct extraordinaire; and Linda Shopes, Ken Wolensky, and John Zwierzyna at the
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

My first exposure to the power of public history came while researching the history of
Homestead, Pennsylvania for a major museum exhibit in 1989. I feel grateful that I have been
able to continue to mine the rich veins of Pennsylvania’s past. Many of the ideas explored in this
study were incubated during various public history projects. I’m grateful to the people I’ve met
along the way and the distinctive Pennsylvania places I’ve had the opportunity to explore. I’d
also like to thank the legion of archivists, staff librarians and civil servants who tirelessly pulled
boxes, sorted through source material, and excavated long forgotten government documents,
especially Frank Kurtik and Becky Abromitis, both formerly with Hillman Library’s Special
Collections; Denise Conklin at Penn State’s Labor Archives; Patti Moran at the USGA Golf
House; Joe Kosack at the Pennsylvania Game Commission; and the excellent and dedicated staff
of both the State Archives and the State Library of Pennsylvania.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to my thesis advisor Ted Muller. Nearly twenty years
ago, Ted helped a vaguely dissatisfied graduate student get his foot in the door of a local
historical society. Years later, he welcomed me back into academia and since then has been
instrumental in helping me balance the often competing demands of academic and public history.
Over the past few years in particular, his support in surmounting this final hurdle, up to and
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