Old is the New New

Way back in September, the very second post in this weblog was an account of lunch with Jason Kaufman, a smart young sociologist at Harvard who wanted to talk to me about the comparative history of Canada and the United States. Reading that post, it’s easy to see my respect and envy (as a historian) of Jason’s willingness (as a sociologist) to make big generalizations and bold, contentious claims. I now have another reason to respect and envy Jason: he had an op-ed piece in this Sunday’s New York Times. (If that link expires, try this one.) But the reaction to the piece by other smart people I also respect reminds me of something about big generalizations and bold claims: they can easily be disputed, and they can often be wrong.

The op-ed is a teaser for Jason and his co-author Orlando Patterson’s article in the next American Sociological Review. Their NYT piece is called “Bowling for Democracy,” which is cute because Jason’s first book was an extended take-down of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. But they’re talking about a different kind of bowling here. The question they started with was, “why don’t Canadians play cricket?” Cricket remains popular in almost all the former British colonies; Canada and the U.S. are the two big exceptions. Kaufman and Patterson’s thesis is that in nineteenth-century Canada and the United States, cricket remained the preserve of upper-class elites. Anxious to maintain their class identity in an increasingly egalitarian society, Canadian and American elites clung to upper-class signifiers like cricket and kept the plebes off the pitch. When baseball came along in the late nineteenth century, it was all too easy for promoters like A.G. Spalding to caricature cricket as a sissy, blue-blooded game and position baseball as the manly, populist alternative. In India and the Caribbean, by contrast, British elites had little fear of class assimilation. There were easier ways to tell who was in the club and who wasn’t, so elites encouraged their colonial subjects to play the game.

Evan Roberts at Coffee Grounds is skeptical, and Sepoy at The Chapati Mystery tears the whole thing down. Crooked Timber batted the topic around too. I myself don’t know a zooter from a googly, but I’m inclined to read Jason a bit more generously. I did find the conclusion of the Times piece a little dubious. It basically says, “if cricket can be imposed from the top down, maybe democracy can too?” Cricket isn’t democracy, and just in case you’re inclined to read between the lines, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is not the British Raj. But I wonder if that ending wasn’t just added as a peg to make this discussion of nineteenth-century leisure a bit more topical.

That said, I think my blogging colleagues zoom in on the egalitarian vs. stratified societies part of the story and underplay the business angle. My own instinct is to ask, “who profits?” And since the point of divergence between North America and the other former colonies seems to be the rise of baseball in the late 19th century, I’ve got to think the real story here is about that all-American pastime, marketing. As Kaufman and Patterson do point out, showmen and entrepreneurs like Spalding promoted the hell out of baseball in the late nineteenth century. I believe it’s fairly well documented that Spalding cooked up the myth of Cooperstown and Abner Doubleday in order to obscure the English origins of “America’s” game. There’s your top-down social phenomena for you: baseball, not cricket. Or middle down, at least. Maybe North American cricketeers sealed the fate of their game not by keeping the common man from playing, but by failing to cut Spalding and his buddies in on a share of the gate.

Now if somebody could only explain to me the sociological origins of curling…

Rereading that post about meeting Jason Kaufman last September reminds me that my terrific year at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is drawing to a close. When I posted that, I thought I would be posting a lot more entries this year about all the talks I went to and the interesting people I met. I really regret that I didn’t—not only because it makes it seem like Jason is the only academic I met this year, but also because it has been such an exciting and stimulating time. The Academy itself is an amazing place for inter-disciplinary and inter-generational conversations. And then there’s the whole Harvard-MIT-Boston community around us. Western is hardly the ends of the earth, but I will miss this place.Case in point: every Tuesday I and the other postdocs at the Academy have lunch with a bunch of older members, mostly retired academics. A large proportion of them are chemists, physicists, and biologists. They’re all very distinguished and can be a lot of fun. Yesterday, conversation became extremely heated about a feud, forty years gone by, between Harvard president Nathan Pusey and DNA discoverer James Watson. I doubt I could parse out all the details for you, but it was something to see. The denouement, just to drop a few more names, involved a skiing trip that John Kenneth Galbraith took with Jackie Kennedy. From there we got on to a story about going to see Alice’s Restaurant with the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza and his KGB tail (Kaptiza’s wife’s verdict: “It’s all about garbage.”), and then a first hand account of being recruited for the Manhattan Project. But this last is no big deal: given the demographics of the Tuesday lunches, it’s a rare week when we don’t end up talking about Los Alamos.