years took a leading position in the field of amateur sport. The progress of invention soon made bicycling safer and adapted it to the use of women by the introduction of the safety bicycle. This machine, chain-driven and with wheels of equal size, appeared in the catalogues of 1887. The pneumatic rubber tire that followed it in a few more years completed the basic structure of the modern bicycle. Lawn tennis, the only genuine rival of baseball and bicycling as American sports, was deliberately invented in England and was imported to America about 1875. Tennis courts were built on private lawns and in the new athletic clubs, and inspired a great increase in the number of the latter. A national association was organized in 1881 and began its series of annual tournaments at Newport. A women's national championship tournament appeared in 1890, and in the next decade the American girl invaded England and there held her own against all comers. The new interest in sport developed most rapidly in the regions where the open country life first disappeared. The games were taken up with an avidity that speedily made them more than an outlet for repressed spirits, and turned them into a positive expression of a new side of American life. They spread from the cities where they were indispensable to the small towns where they were less needed. Not only the rich patronized them, but people of moderate means enjoyed them and were able to pay for them. City governments provided them at public cost for the poorer classes. The prosperity of the eighties was enough to provide a wide and immediate following for sport or anything else that appeared to be worth while. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Phineas T. Barnum, Life of P. T. Barnum (1855), was republished in almost annual editions as an advertising device, but is packed with entertaining information which is often accurate. Helen Cody Wetmore, Last of the Great Scouts: The Life Story of Colonel William F. Cody, “Buffalo Bill" (1889), and John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), give interesting data on the Far West. Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1891), is one of the best accounts of the West as a playground. The literature of sport is fragmentary and unreliable. The files of Outing (beginning 1882 as the Wheelman) provide the best single source. The New York Herald gives the most detailed sporting news. Other works of value are Albert G. Spalding, America's National Game (1911); George B. Grinnell, Brief History of the Boone and Crockett Club (1911); and F. L. Paxson, "The Rise of Sport," in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, September, 1917. CHAPTER XIII LABOR IDEALS THE closing frontier removed the outlet that had exerted a continuous influence for a century, and the rise of sport to some extent provided a substitute method of relief; but greater changes were occasioned by the disappearance of free lands than those which were simply of the body and the spirit. The ease with which economic independence could be obtained steadily declined, and a typical citizen lost the expectations hitherto prevailing that he could be financially independent in his early middle age. It became more difficult to go into agriculture. Expanding industry brought into existence cities filled with factory workers whose future was often bounded by the factory walls. Labor movement The labor problem took on a new importance as the hope of individual independence weakened. The factory produced class consciousness among the workers, who could see the sharp contrast between their lives and those of their employers, without seeing a way of bettering their condition except by organization. prices The contrast between the comforts and resources of the few and those of the bulk of the population became sharper Wages and than it ever had been. In earlier periods wealth had been distributed with greater equality, and there had been fewer luxuries or enjoyments that money could buy. The new inventions and recreations were now brought within reach of the well-to-do, and men of means found opportunity in the shifting industry to increase their wealth. It gave the worker little satisfaction to know that he was probably better off than men in his position had ever been before. The prices of commodities in 1890 were less than half those that prevailed in 1865, and were actually lower than those of 1860 before the Civil War. The declining curve of prices after 1865 made life easier for the middle class and the wage-earners living on fixed incomes. This advantage was increased by the fact that wages were rising, those of 1890 averaging 68 per cent above those of 1860. With prices falling and wages rising on a steeper curve, the wage-earner had no grievance as he looked behind him. His grievance lay before him, as he looked into the future and saw a small fraction of the population enjoying advantages hitherto unknown, whose attainment lay beyond his reach. The National Labor Union of 1866 ran its course until it blundered into politics and died trying to absorb the greenback doctrine. The Knights of Labor represented the next serious attempt to develop consciousness among workingmen, and to organize them on a national scale. Its existence for over ten years as a secret society of which the public was vaguely and nervously conscious carried it through the panic of 1873 and the period of the railroad strikes. At the beginning of the next decade it threw aside the cloak of secrecy and became the open spokesman of all labor. Its basis of organization was the individual workman, regardless of his craft, and it admitted all workers but lawyers, bankers, and saloon-keepers. Its theory of organization was a threat to that of the trade union that was working for solidarity in the various crafts. In 1881 a federation of organized trade and labor unions was organized in Pittsburgh to preserve the autonomy of local union, and yet provide a national organization. The American Federation of Labor, as this body came to be known, had a limited success until 1887, the Knights of Labor, meanwhile, remaining the more prominent organization. One general activity of the Knights of Labor was its promotion of a statistical study of the conditions of labor. In 1891, said Senator Aldrich in the preface to his report on prices, "there was no data in existence by which the actual or relative status of wage-earners could at any time be accurately measured." A National Bureau of Labor was created by Con- Bureau gress in 1884, to assist in this study, and thirty- of Labor one States had somewhat similar bureaus by 1893. The Knights desired to secure the post of Commissioner of Labor for their Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly, but Arthur instead appointed a distinguished economist, Carroll D. Wright. The annual report of the Bureau became a mine of information on the labor movement. In 1887 and again in 1894 and 1901, it was devoted especially to a summary of strikes and lockouts. Increasing knowledge coupled with an actually improving status increased the uneasiness of labor instead of moderating it. The panic of 1884 left temporary depression in its wake that distorted the curves of wages and prices for a brief interval. In 1885 Powderly discussed "the army of the discontented" in the North American Review, and believed that at the moment there were two million workmen unemployed. There appeared to be a lack of correlation when farmers complained of overproduction and falling prices and labor thought itself unable to get along. The prosperity that was insufficient for American workmen attracted immigrants in increasing numbers after 1878, until in the year 1882 they totaled 788,992. To many of these the condition of labor in America was better than their expectation, but they quickly absorbed the discontent of organized American labor in addition to alien ideals that they imported and propagated in the United States. Between 1878 and 1890 the German Government proscribed the Socialists, forcing them under cover and into Anarchy and socialism secrecy, and driving the more enterprising of them to migration. Compulsory military service increased the volume of European emigration. The repressive policy of Russia bred anarchy and nihilism among the working-classes and further increased the stream of population attracted by the prosperity of the United States. The arrival in America of immigrants who knew neither Republican nor Democrat, but who avowed themselves to be followers of Karl Marx or of the exponents of anarchy, jarred the complacency of the United States as it regarded American institutions. The names of the new schools of thought were freely used without differentiation. Violence and murder were their earmarks for the |