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Basepaths to Empire: Race and the Spalding World Baseball Tour1
by Thomas W. Zeiler, University of Colorado at Boulder
During the Gilded Age, transnational American agents carried national values abroad, including defense of the "civilizing mission" of the white race toward people of color. This article explores race within the context of the Spalding world baseball tour of 1888–89, a transnational enterprise that marketed the national pastime abroad and, in so doing, indicated the latent, private power behind the official policies of the United States. A rather unusual segment of society to be considered for such scholarly treatment, professional baseball elites nonetheless helped generate a racist imperial ideology and thus added to the voices that set racial parameters for the American empire when it was attained in 1898. By tracing the racial attitudes of the baseball tourists, this article contributes to recent scholarly enterprises that examine foreign relations from a cultural perspective and integrate overlooked actors into the study of diplomatic history.
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After an audience with President Grover Cleveland in Washington, D.C. on October 8, 1888, the Chicago White Stockings baseball club returned to the Windy City and embarked on a remarkable tour of the world. Led by Albert Goodwill Spalding, owner of the White Stockings, professional baseball's most influential figure, and the nation's sporting goods king, the team played fifty-four exhibition matches around the globe against an "All-America" squad of stars recruited from the National League, the top run of the sport at that time. Spalding's entourage also included league officials, businessmen, journalists, entertainers, and family members. The two teams displayed the game from Chicago to San Francisco, from where they embarked for Hawaii and then traversed the seas to New Zealand, Australia, and Ceylon, before landing in Egypt. Heading through the Suez Canal, they played in Italy in February 1889, traveled through France to play near a half-built Eiffel Tower in Paris, and finished the foreign leg of the tour with several matches in England, Scotland, and Ireland. They exhibited baseball, and American manliness and pluck (believed Spalding), before thousands of mystified spectators, government officials, and royalty, including the Prince of Wales. Sailing for New York City on March 29, the tourists worked their way up and down the East Coast, meeting newly inaugurated President Benjamin Harrison and being feted by such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain. They finally made their way home across the Midwest to Chicago in April 1889.2 |
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Because of its six-month duration and global scope, this trip by the "Spalding tourists" marked a new level of prominence for the national pastime. The tour was far more ambitious than previous baseball tours, which consisted mainly of cross-country barnstorming tours or short trips to Cuba (begun in 1879). In 1874, the first major international foray, in which Spalding himself had participated, confined itself to Great Britain. These prior tours were efforts to drum up business, satisfy baseball-crazed fans in places where professional baseball did not exist, or introduce it to cricket-playing Britons. They lacked Spalding's broad vision and, most important, the greater national meaning that his world tour implied. To be sure, the 1888–89 world tour also sought the profitable enlargement of Spalding's sporting goods empire. Yet at heart, the tour expressed Americans' belief in their own exceptional nature. The professional baseball tour signified, at least to those who organized and participated in it, a national character built on entrepreneurial skills and mastery of technological innovation, an untamed, democratic spirit in the face of old world aristocracy and militarism, and a culture of movement, manliness, and racial hierarchy. This latter characteristic is the subject of this article, but all of these qualities fed dreams of future imperial greatness for the United States. Like other American undertakings that projected the mindset of American imperialism in the years before empire became a reality after the Spanish-American War of 1898, the baseball tourists' grand venture forecast the desire and intention to take part in the Great Power game of imperialism. |
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