one.5 The forces that have led to increasing in e quality in education, the workplace, and other spheres have come to the world of play. This means that Competitive Kid Capital is unequally distributed.
What are the social forces that have shaped the evolution of these children’s competitive activities from roughly the turn of the twentieth century up to the present? The answer is linked to major changes in three social institutions: the family, the educational system, and the organization of competition and prizes. This chapter provides a history of the development of competitive children’s activities in the United States. To illustrate this history, I examine the evolution of the three case study activities: chess, soccer, and dance.
COMPETITIVE AFTER - SCHOOL HOURS OVER TIME
Beginning in the late nineteenth century compulsory education had important consequences for families and the economy. With the institution of mandatory schooling children experienced a profound shift in the structure of their daily lives, especially in the social organization of their time. Compulsory education brought leisure time into focus; since “school time” was delineated as obligatory, “free time” could now be identified as well.6
What to do with this free time? The question was on the minds of parents, social workers, and “experts” who doled out advice on child rearing. The answer lay partly in competitive sports leagues, which started to evolve to hold the interest of children, the first phase in the development of children’s competitive activities. Overall we can identify three key periods of development: the first runs from the Progressive Era through World War II; the second moves from the postwar period to the 1970s; and the third takes us from the 1980s into the present.7
Seeds of Competition: Progressive Era to World War II
The Progressive Era, with its organizational and reform impulses, inevitably focused on children’s lives.8 These impulses gave rise to some of the earliest organized competitive events among American children. For example, reformers concerned about the health of babies started “better baby” contests in 1908 as a way to teach primarily immigrant and lower-class mothers the values of hygiene and nutrition.9 The contests were often held at state fairs, where judges evaluated children along several dimensions, including measurements and appearance, in order to find the “healthiest” or the “most beautiful” baby.10 These contests required little more of the baby than to submit to being poked, prodded, and put on display; the competition was really among adults.11
Reformers didn’t forget older children. With the simultaneous rise of mandatory schooling and laws restricting child labor,12 worry mounted over the idle hours of children, which many assumed would be filled with delinquent or self-destructive activities. Urban reformers were particularly preoccupied with poor immigrant boys who, because of overcrowding in tenements, were often on the streets.13
Reformers’ focus was less on age-specific activities and more generally on “removing urban children from city streets.”14 Initial efforts focused on the establishment of parks and playgrounds, and powerful, organized playground movements developed in New York City and Boston.15 But because adults “did not trust city boys to play unsupervised,” attention soon shifted to organized sports.16
Sports were seen as important in teaching the “American” values of cooperation, hard work, and respect for authority. Progressive reformers thought athletic activities could prepare children for the “new industrial society that was emerging,”17 which would require them to be physical laborers. Organized youth groups such as the YMCA took on the responsibility of providing children with sports activities.
In 1903 New York City’s Public School Athletic League for Boys (PSAL) was established, and formal contests between children, organized by adults, emerged as a way to keep the boys coming back to activities, clubs, and school. Formal competition ensured the boys’ continued participation since they wanted to defend their team’s record and honor. Luther Gulick, founder of the PSAL, thought, “Group loyalty becomes team loyalty, and team loyalty enhances school loyalty, for the spirit of loyalty and morality demonstrated publicly spreads to all the students, not just those who compete.”18
A girls’ league within the PSAL was founded in 1905, though many of the combative and competitive elements present in the boys’ league were eliminated.19 In 1914 the New York version became part of the city’s Board of Education. By 1910 seventeen other cities across the United States had formed their own competitive athletic leagues modeled after New York City’s PSAL. Settlement houses and ethnic clubs soon followed suit. The number of these boys’ clubs grew rapidly through the 1920s, working in parallel with school leagues.
The national spelling bee, a nonathletic competitive activity for children, also grew in popularity at this time. Spelling bees, known historically as spelling fights or spelling parties, are an American folk tradition. Throughout the eighteenth century they were part of the typical Colonial education, and by the nineteenth century they had developed into community social events.20 By the turn of the twentieth century spelling bees had evolved into a competitive educational tool. In her history of American childhood from 1850 to 1950 Priscilla Ferguson Clement explains, “Individual competition was also a constant in [late] nineteenth-century schools. In rural areas, teachers held weekly spelling bees in which youngsters stood in a line before the teacher (toed the line) and vied to be at the head of the line rather than at the foot.”21
Around the turn of the twentieth century a social movement formed to promote a national student-only bee. The first nationwide student bee was held on June 29, 1908. But due to racial tensions (after a young black girl won), the next national student spelling bee was not held again until the 1920s. By 1925 the national student spelling bee as we know it, complete with corporate sponsorship, had taken shape.22
Other community-based competitions, such as Music Memory Contests and mouth organ contests, were also popular at this time.23 Additionally, in 1934 the organization that would become the National Guild of Piano Teachers’ National Piano Playing Tournament was formed.24
During this time children from wealthier families generally received a variety of lessons thought to enhance their social skills and prospects. In a history of children from different class backgrounds in the United States, Harvey Graff wrote of one new upper-middle-class, turn-of-the-century family, the Spencers: “The Spencer children went to dancing school, dressing the part and meeting their peers of the opposite sex. The girls were given music lessons, with varying degrees of success.”25 These activities were organized and overseen by adults but were not yet competitive. (This was especially true for dance, as I discuss below.)
By the 1930s this pattern began to shift as a consequence of the Great Depression and as educational philosophies changed. During the Depression, many clubs with competitive leagues suffered financially and had to close, so poorer children from urban areas began to lose sites for competitive athletic contests organized by adults. Fee-based groups, such as the YMCA, began to fill the void, but usually only middle-class kids could afford to participate.26
At roughly the same historical moment athletic organizations were founded that would soon formally institute national competitive tournaments for young kids, for a price. National pay-to-play organizations, such as Pop Warner Football and Little League Baseball, came into being in 1929 and 1939, respectively.
At the same time, many physical education professionals stopped supporting athletic competition for children because of worries that leagues supported competition only for the best athletes, leaving the others behind. Concerns about focusing on only the most talented athletes developed into questions about the harmfulness of competition. Historian Susan
