Babe Ruth and the American Dream

In the 1920s, sports writers and agents sold Americans on larger-than-life heroes, athletes that people could live through vicariously while celebrating their "rags to riches" backgrounds. Matt Andrews tells the story of two men that embodied the American dream and became sports legends: Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome,
and we're back on the untold History of sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Last time, we discussed the

(00:34):
idea of amateurism versus professionalism in sports and framed it
around the story of one of the great American athletes
of all time, Jim Thorpe. Today we'll be discussing sports
in the nineteen twenties and the legends that were made
in that era, specifically baseball player Babe Ruth and boxer
Jack Dempsey. What was happening in America at that time

(00:56):
that enabled athletes to enter godlike mythology. Well, Matt has
the answer. The nineteenth century certainly had its sports celebrities,
John L. Sullivan most notably, but really nothing like what
Americans got in the nineteen twenties. One of the giants

(01:19):
of early American sports writing was a guy named Paul Gallico,
and in Galico was looking back on the nineteen twenties
and he put it like this, never before has there
been a period when from the ranks of every sport
arose some glamorous, unbeatable figure who shattered record after record spread,

(01:43):
eagled his field, and drew into the box office an
unending stream of gold and silver. We have lived through
a decade of deathless heroes. Deathless heroes, I like that phrase. Well,
this decade of deathless heroes is due to a few things,
and this is our outline for today. First, the historical

(02:07):
setting was right Americans in the nineteen twenties. They were
ready for sports heroes. So one might even argue that
Americans needed sports heroes, and I will explain this, you know. Second,
there's the athletes themselves. So there were some remarkable athletes
in this era, athletes who would have been considered great
and heroic in in any era, really, and we will

(02:28):
focus on two of them. And then finally, one of
the reasons for their heroic status is that these athletes
were sold to the American public, and that's the word
I want to use. Sold. Maybe they actually weren't all
that heroic in reality, but they were packaged and presented
to the American public as such. And this is something

(02:51):
new in American sport history. So that's our battle plan today,
And let's start with the historical context, as all good
historians do. What was it about the nineteen twenties that
made Americans so reset active to the idea of athletes
as heroes. Well, the first thing we need to note
is that the nineteen twenties were the decade that immediately

(03:13):
followed World War One. The United States was directly involved
in this war from a fighting standpoint from April of
nineteen seventeen to November of nineteen eighteen, so only nineteen months.
But World War One had a greater effect on sports
in the United States than any other war in American history,

(03:34):
more than the Civil War, more than World War Two,
more than Vietnam. And the effect was this, World War
One made physical fitness a patriotic virtue. It made Americans
think of sports and athleticism as a patriotic necessity. You know,

(03:55):
we talked about how sports were becoming more and more
a part of everyday life at the start of the
twentieth century, and then comes this Great War. At the start,
art physical educators assured Americans that they were ready for
war because they were a nation of athletes. During the war,
the military use sport as a regular part of training.

(04:17):
Camp soldiers used sports like boxing to prepare themselves for battle.
And then after the war was over, Americans pointed to
sports as one of the explanations for their victory. So
it's a it's a lengthy quote, but it fits so
perfectly with what I'm talking about. I feel like I
must use it. I give you our old friend Walter Camp,

(04:41):
remember him, the father of college football. Well, here he
is talking about why the United States was victorious in
the Great War. He said this, Our boxing was made
the basis of bayonet fighting, and our baseball arms were
adept at learning to throw the grenade. The men who
had gone into the opposing football line when the signal

(05:03):
came went over the top and into of the trenches
with the same abandoned Those who had made a stand
on the last five yard line in the grim determination
of the gridiron faced the scrimmage of war with the
same do or die fortitude. Those who had raced on
the cinder track and thrown their last efforts into the
sprint at the finish were game when the pathway was

(05:25):
a Flanders battlefield. The men who took the big chance
on the motor track took the greater chances in the air.
With the same spirit. The men whose nerves had been
tested with two men on, one out and a run
to tie and two to win, stood smiling when the
line was thin. That's great stuff from Halter Camp. Are

(05:48):
sports are the reason we won this war? You know,
sports and militarism and American patriotism. These three things have
been closely linked in the American mind ever since those
military fly overs you get when you go to a
football game. It starts right here. I mean, not the flyovers,

(06:10):
but the explicit connections between sport, militarism, and war. To
relate this to the nineteen twenties, then, as the nineteen
twenties dawned, there were very few Americans questioning the value
of sports anymore. You know, after all, without sports, where
would we be. We'd all be speaking German. That that

(06:31):
was the idea. So the table was set for a
national celebration of sport and the athletes who excelled in
those sports. But here's another reason for the rise of
sports and sports heroes in the nineteen twenties. It's not
just that the setting was ripe for American sports heroes.

(06:51):
It's it's that in the nineteen twenties, the public wanted heroes.
The public needed heroes. The public was thirsting for heroes.
And to explain why, I need to tell you about
something called mass culture. In nineteen twenty two, there was
an American intellectual named Walter Lippmann, and he argued that

(07:14):
ordinary Americans were drowning in a sea of mass culture.
Americans existed in one big, homogeneous mass culture, he said,
in which it was difficult for the individual to truly
stand out. Americans were all wearing the same clothes to work.

(07:34):
They were all eating the same cereal for breakfast. They
were all driving the same car. In the early nineteen twenties,
the decade we're talking about, two out of every three
cars on the road were Model T s, and they
were all black. Henry Ford used to say, you could
get the Model T in any color you want, as
long as it's black. And I can briefly relate this

(07:55):
to sports. After big sporting events like a college football game,
it took people in the crowd an hour to find
their individual car, as every car in the parking lot
was a black Model T. So Americans were all consuming
the same products. Everyone was the same that way. But
more than this, Walter Littman argued that American life had

(08:17):
become thoroughly standardized and bureaucraticized. Americans could no longer get
ahead in the job place and truly distinguish themselves. Americans
were stuck in their jobs. They were faceless blue collar
workers on assembly lines or faceless white collar workers pushing
papers and massive corporate impersonal offices. Everyone was the same.

(08:44):
Everyone was average. No one ever has the opportunity to
do a noble or heroic act. If you've ever read
the book or seen the movie Fight Club, it's the
exact same idea. The modern, unexciting corporate world. It makes
real success and the truly heroic act eluse of now.

(09:06):
In Fight Club, the protagonist takes up underground bare knuckle
boxing to combat this problem. To bring up a rush
of energy and excitement into his life, he needs to
taste blood to feel alive. Well, in the nine twenties,
Americans didn't turn to underground boxing. Instead, what they do
is this, They begin living out imaginative and vicarious lives

(09:30):
through the exciting exploits of others. Some Americans went to
the movies, and they lived vicariously through the fictitious characters
on the screen, but others found meaning in the exploits
of real life athletes playing sports. It's in the context

(09:50):
of this standardized, faceless, you know, anti individualistic mass culture
that great athletes became what one historian calls compensatory sports heroes,
and I like that phrase as well. Compensatory sports heroes.
The idea here is that athletes become larger than life

(10:11):
figures because they compensate for the lack of success and
excitement in the lives of the general public. This is
why we care so much about sports today. One could
argue we invest as much emotion in the games played
by others as we do to the events in our
own lives, and that's because we sense that we have

(10:33):
no real chance for heroic greatness in our lives. Our
lives are comfortable and boring, so we live vicariously through sports.
I don't know what, what do you think? It's a
pretty depressing thought, actually, But do you think there's any
truth in this? You know, I'm not asking you to
engage in deep critical self analysis here that can be dangerous,

(10:56):
But do you think there's something to this theory? Well?
Those are the theories or World War leads to a
national celebration of sport and then the bland morass of
mass culture. It causes Americans to yearn for moments of
heroic greatness, and then come the athletes who do the

(11:16):
things that we consider heroic. There was Bobby Jones, the golfer,
and Big Bill Tilden, the tennis star of all time,
greats heroes to the American public, both of them. But
golf and tennis are all fine and good. But as
you know, the national pastime was baseball, and the game

(11:37):
of baseball had a compensatory sports hero of Ruthian magnitude,
and not so coincidentally, his name was Babe Ruth. In
a nutshell, here is the meaning of Babe Ruth for
Americans in the nineteen twenties. Babe Ruth was living proof

(11:59):
that the lone individual could still rise from humble beginnings
to secure fame and fortune. Babe Ruth was the American dream.
Babe Ruth was a wild and unruly street kid from
Baltimore who learned to play baseball in reform school where
he lived for over a decade, and then he entered

(12:20):
Major League baseball as a pitcher. Actually, he was a
great pitcher who rose to prominence with the Boston Red Sox,
and then Babe Ruth surprised the baseball world when he
started playing in the outfield on his non pitching days,
and in nineteen nineteen, Babe Ruth hit twenty nine home runs,
which was two more than the existing major league record.

(12:42):
That offseason, the owner of the Red Sox he needed
some money to fund a Broadway play of his so
he sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for
a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. Here's my analysis,
huge mistake, huge mistake, Red Sox fans that you don't
get those insights just just anywhere. Well, though this was

(13:04):
a lossle error for the Red Sox, clearly it was
a stroke of luck for the Yankees and major League
Baseball because Babe Ruth was now in the cultural capital
of the United States, New York City, and so when
he starts to perform his remarkable athletic feats, he's smack
dab in the middle of the nation's media capital. Playing

(13:25):
for the New York Yankees. That next year, in Babe
Ruth hit a stunning total of fifty four home runs.
Only one other team in baseball hit that many home
runs that year, So this was unprecedented power. I mean,
if someone did this today, we would automatically think they
were on steroids. So what Babe Ruth did is almost superhuman.

(13:51):
And the next year he hit fifty nine home runs
his one season. It gets my vote for the greatest
year a player ever had in baseball history. If you
have time and care about such things, check out the stats.
But the public responded to Ruth's awesome feats with overwhelming enthusiasm.

(14:14):
Yankee attendants, it's sword at home, it's sword on the road.
Spectators were riveted by Babe Ruth and his mighty swings.
Americans were Babe Ruth and home run crazy. But what
is it about the home run that intoxicates the American
sports fan. You know, I'm a little wary of overthinking

(14:37):
this stuff, but let me put the home run in
the context of this lecture and suggest this. Babe Ruth's
towering home runs represented a dramatic finality. They were a
total clearing of the bases with one mighty swat. And
so what Babe Ruth was doing on the baseball diamond

(14:58):
was taking matters into his own hands, right, Why get
on base and hope someone else hits you home. Babe
Ruth did it all by himself, and so what Ruth
was doing in baseball was what many Americans felt they
could no longer do in their own lives, succeed spectacularly
on their own, and so Americans they latched onto Babe Ruth.

(15:22):
They idolized him. Babe Ruth was their great compensatory sports hero.
But now I need to complicate this because actually Ruth
was not doing this all by himself. And though there's
another athlete I still want to talk about, let's talk
about how athletes like Babe Ruth were sold to the

(15:43):
American public. After the break, Sports writers and promoters around
the country turn American sports stars into legends. Babe Ruth

(16:07):
and the other athletes of the nineteen twenties benefited from
a number of changes in the way that sports were
being promoted. The nineteen twenties this was the dawn of
the era of radio. You could now hear the deeds
of these athletes as they were actually happening. You could
hear the crack of the bat in Yankee Stadium on
your radio. This was the era of newsreels at the

(16:30):
moving picture shows, where Americans could see these athletes performing
their tremendous feats. You live in Iowa, but now you
go to your movie house and you can see Babe Ruth.
And the old fashioned newspaper was important as well, especially
with the rise of a new generation of sports writers
and something that's known as g whizz sports journalism. The

(16:54):
nineteen twenties were the golden years of sports writing. Also
fabulous writers like Ring Lardner and Grantlin Rice. These sports
writers and not right about mortal men. They wrote about gods.
They created images of athletes that often went way beyond
the athletes actual accomplishments. You know. They described athletes as

(17:17):
as as supernatural forces. For example, there was a University
of Illinois football player Red Grange. Red Grange is a
pretty cool name already, but even cooler was the nickname
given to him by a Chicago sportswriter, the Galloping Ghost
of the Gridiron. Sports writers in the nineteen twenties they

(17:38):
understood that the building up the image of athletes. To
do this was to secure enjoyable and lucrative employment for themselves.
They knew that the public wanted their heroes, and so
with great literary flourish. They gave the public what they wanted.
They gave them larger than life figures, ge whiz sportswriting

(18:01):
as in ge Whiz, ain't they great? But finally, also
important was the rise of the professional promoter, the sports agent.
These agents sold these athletes to the public. The nwies
was the decade when advertising becomes a national phenomenon in

(18:23):
American history, when when advertising agents are crafting images of
products and trying to sell these products to the public, cars, cigarettes,
cleaning products, whatever. And just as advertising agents tried to
sell items to the public by by packaging and promoting them,
sports agents packaged their athletes as commodities to be sold

(18:47):
as well. And so the man who might be as
responsible for the legend of Babe Ruth as Babe Ruth
is a guy named Christy Walsh. Christie Walsh was Babe
Ruth's agent, his promoter. He's the first real sports agent,
and he cultivated a grand public image for Ruth. You know,

(19:08):
in newspapers all over the country there were articles from
Babe Ruth describing each of his home runs the day
after he hit him. But Babe Ruth didn't write these.
Christie Walsh did. It was Christie Walsh who spread the
stories that Babe Ruth had gone into a hospital promised
a dying child he would hit a home run and
then do just that. There's actually no evidence to suggest

(19:31):
that these stories are true, and it was Walsh who
masterminded Babe Ruth as an advertising icon. Babe Ruth sold
fishing equipment, alligators, shoes, three types of automobiles, baseball gear, cigarettes,
you name it. Babe Ruth sold Americans all these things.
But it was Christie Walsh who sold us Babe Ruth.

(19:54):
This is when that starts. So when we have a
conversation about the modern athlete, I think it's a conversation
that really starts with Babe Ruth. He was an fleet,
a showman, a media phenomenon, and an advertising pitchman. The
other great compensatory sports hero of the nineteen twenties was

(20:17):
a prize fighter, Jack Dempsey, and he also was sold
to the American public. Boxing became less popular among white
Americans in ten with the victory of Jack Johnson over
Jim Jeffreys. We talked about that, but then Jack Johnson
lost and the color line was redrawn, and then World

(20:39):
War One rekindled interest in the sport. But boxing needed
a new superstar if it was ever going to recapture
the fancy of the average American sports fan, and so
enter text Record. Remember him, text Record was the man
who had promoted the Johnson Jeffreys fight of and now

(21:00):
he was looking for a new boxing hero, but a
white boxing hero, and Rickard found his guy in an
unknown fighter from Colorado named Jack Dempsey. Dempsey wasn't all
that big. He was six ft eighty seven pounds, and
he wasn't all that skillful of a boxer. Actually, I
mean nowhere near the skill of Jack Johnson. But Jack

(21:22):
Dempsey was ferocious, a real brawler who constantly charged forward
and swung with all his might. Jack Dempsey was the
most offensive minded heavyweight champion until a guy named Mike Tyson.
And Dempsey had been little more than a western saloon fighter,
you know. He kind of lived the life of a hobo,

(21:43):
traveling the western towns fighting for a few dollars. But
in nineteen nineteen, text Rickard got hold of him and
he gave Jack Dempsey the chance to fight the champion,
Jess Willard. Willard was a massive six ft six boxer.
He was the guy who had defeated Jack Johnson. Well,
Jack Dempsey savaged Willard. He knocked Willard down five times

(22:06):
in the first round, and at the end of the
third round, Willard's face was swollen to twice its normal size,
and Jess Willard just quit. Text Ricord bill Dempsey as
Jack the giant killer. You know. He promoted Dempsey as
the little guy, the average guy, the guy who had
just been given that one opportunity and succeeded gloriously, just

(22:30):
like Babe Ruth. You know. He lived the rags to
riches story and embodied the American dream. And text Ricord
carefully crafted Jack Dempsey's image, and he constructed an easy
to understand narrative around all of Dempsey's fights. Rickards sold
Jack Dempsey's fights to the public like selling a model

(22:52):
t or breakfast cereal. You know. For example, Dempsey fought
George Carpentier of France, and in Rickard's hand, the fight
was billed as European elegance versus raw American strength. Eighty
thou spectators bought into this, and they came to a
temporary arena in Jersey City, and this was boxing's first

(23:15):
million dollar gate. A million dollars in ticket sales, and
the crowd saw Jack Dempsey overwhelmed Carpentier, knocking him out
in the fourth round. Dempsey's next fight was against an
unknown Argentinian named Louis Furpo. Louis Furpo had a day job.
He he washed bottles in a Buenos Aires pharmacy. But

(23:38):
in the promotional hands of texts Rickord, Furpo was billed
as the wild bull of the Pampas. That the Pampas
being the Argentinian prairie. And this is a name that
sounds a lot cooler than the Buenos Aires bottle washer.
Text Ricord build this fight as North American versus South American,

(23:58):
and this was a legendary fight. It was four minutes
of NonStop action. In the first round, Dempsey knocked down
Furbo seven times, and in that same round, fur Bo
got up from one of those seven knockdowns and blasted
a right cross to Dempsey's jaw that sent Jack Dempsey
through the ropes and totally out of the ring. Reporters

(24:23):
hoisted Dempsey back into the ring and in the next round,
the second swinging both fists wildly, the champ knocked for
Bo out and by now, the public was in love
with Dempsey's all or nothing style, you know, pure action
knockouts or getting knocked out of the ring. A cultural

(24:43):
historian might suggest that what we have here are Americans
thirsting for excitement, and Jack Dempsey is giving it to them.
If you want proof that Americans love Dempsey and his
all or nothing style, you only need to know that
he lost his next two fights, and Americans loved him

(25:03):
even more. Dempsey's next two fights were both against Gene Tunney.
Gene Tunny was unlike most professional boxers. He he read books,
he played chess, he wrote poetry. He actually lectured on
Shakespeare at a local college. So text Rickard promoted the

(25:25):
fight as the wild, savage Dempsey against the enlightened and
scientific Gene Tunney. And we've actually seen this fight before.
In this course, you might remember the John L. Sullivan
James Corbett about a fight where many Americans they wanted
the more scientific and disciplined and educated Jim Corbett to win,

(25:49):
but not now. Now they wanted the savage brawler, the
man who swung with all his might, the more thrilling fighter.
You know, this was the spirit of the times the
first time they fought was in in Philadelphia, where a
hundred and twenty thousand fans came and they were shocked

(26:09):
when the defensive minded Tuney he defeated Dempsey on points.
He just avoided Dempsey's wild blows, but boxing fans criticized
Tunny for his tactical, boring strategy. The rematch took place
in Chicago the next year, and it was here that
maybe the most famous moment in boxing history occurred, in

(26:34):
front of a hundred and fifty thousand spectators a hundred
and fifty thousand and fifty million people listening to NBC radio.
The first six rounds were uneventful, then in the seventh round,
Dempsey landed a series of blows that knocked Gene Tunny
to the canvas, and as the referee prepared to count

(26:55):
to ten, he told Dempsey to go to a neutral corner.
This was a brand new rule in boxing, and both
fighters had agreed to abide by this rule for the bout.
Before the referee would begin counting, the other fighter had
to retreat to a neutral corner, but Dempsey ignored the command.

(27:16):
He instinctively and aggressively hovered over Tenny, and by the
time the referee got Dempsey to back off into the corner.
Five seconds had gone by. The referee then began to
count to ten, and he was at nine when Gene
Tunny pulled himself up. So Tunny was down for at
least fifteen seconds and what has been known forever since

(27:39):
as the long count. It cost Jack Dempsey the title.
Tunny made it through the seventh round, and then he
boxed well enough over the final three rounds to win
again in points. But in defeat, Dempsey became even more popular.
He was the type of athlete the public wanted. He
was the brawler who relied upon quick physical solutions, just

(28:03):
like Babe Ruth hitting a home run. Sure he had
made a mistake, but we all make mistakes, and at
least his mistake was committed in a rush of enthusiasm
and excitement. That was the idea. Dempsey retired after this
bout and Gene Tunney's future fights they were commercial flops,

(28:24):
a suggestion that maybe it was Jack Dempsey and not
boxing that was popular in the nineteen twenties. That's all
for now. Next time on the Untold History of Sports
in America, presented by One Day University, The story of
Mildred Ditrickson,