The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [113]
Pre–Civil War baseball was mostly about New York City and Brooklyn, beginning with the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in 1842. They drew up rules and found a permanent site at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. After the Civil War, baseball’s popularity took off nationwide, not only as a diversion, but as a source of “fresh air and friendship—two things which are of all others most effective for promoting happiness.”4 In the early 1890s two YMCA employees, James Naismith and William Morgan, invented, respectively, basketball and volleyball as tightly contained court games for the training and expelling of teenage energy. In 1903 the YMCA established Camp Becket for children as “a center of happiness.”
Despite late-nineteenth-century encouragement of sports and exercise, there were a lot of tensions around it, in particular for women. In the Victorian period women were supposed to avoid exercise. The idea was that women’s bodies were so taxed by menstruation, pregnancy, parturition, and nursing that women had to rest a lot or they would go mad—and produce a weak new generation. The social theorist G. Stanley Hall wrote that a woman “at home with the racket and on the golf links” was ruined for motherhood. “She has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her account with heredity that, like every perfectly and completely developed individual, she is also completely sterile.”5 The childless might be made to suffer guilt by this logic. Those happy with their fertility would be impervious to such threats, but a more subtle one was available: modern nervousness. Men, too, were thought to suffer from too much mental and physical exercise, a limp exhaustion sometimes diagnosed as neurasthenia. Theorists posited that a few individuals were “millionaires of nerve-force,” but most people who did too much suffered.6 George Beard, the “inventor” and prime theorist of neurasthenia, spoke in metaphors of the new science of electricity. As he explained it, the body has a circuit that can be overloaded:
[W]hen new functions are interposed in the circuit, as modern civilization is constantly requiring us to do, there comes a period…when the amount of force is insufficient to keep all the lamps actively burning; those that are weakest go out entirely, or as more frequently happens, burn faintly and feebly—they do not expire, but give an insufficient and unstable light—this is the philosophy of modern nervousness.7
In the late nineteenth century, it seemed as if everyone was overwhelmed by the speed of things and needed a rest. Not only was energy being depleted by stress and work; people believed that the actual organs of our bodies, especially the heart, would experience fatigue if exercised often. In the year of the first U.S. marathon, 1897, the Journal of the American Medical Association sounded an alarm that it was “unquestionable” that the marathon would damage the runners’ hearts. The concept seemed too obvious to be wrong: if you want something to last, you use it sparingly; you certainly don’t go tiring it out for no reason. Textbooks said people over forty should not exercise, and that anyone with heart problems should rest in bed and shouldn’t walk much or run at all.
But nervousness is a peacetime trouble, and World War I required an image of strong, healthy boys. The optimism of the 1920s made that decade a heyday of public sports. Since a certain toughness was now in vogue in the mundane world, Protestants began to break with the idea of Muscular Christianity. People like Sinclair Lewis now stood up for the spiritual version of the church. Surprisingly, Muscular Christianity, including the name itself, was then taken up by the Catholic Church. Some just wandered out of the pews and into the stands (Go, Notre Dame!). Also, as German immigration increased, another major source of sports in the young United States were “Turner societies,