Remaking the Working Class in the US and UK: Sports, Home Hobbies, and the Transformation of Working-Class Structures of Race and Gender, 1880-1930

Rudi Batzell, Lake Forest College

In both the US and the UK, changing trajectories within working-class life fundamentally remade the habits and dispositions of workers, creating a new kind of sociability that would come to support new forms of centralized, bureaucratic collective action in the Fordist order of the twentieth century. Offering a comparative approach, this paper is rooted in archival research in the two steel cities of Pittsburgh and Sheffield, and the transportation hubs of Baltimore and Liverpool. In place of the informal leisure of the streets, working-class youths spent more days and more years in schools that required attention to formal routines and institutional forms of communication and discipline. Workers drank less alcohol, and informal street leisure declined. New home hobbies, such as gardening and DIY became accessible to some workers. Hugely popular commercial, professional sports exemplified the consolidation of a new working-class sociability and masculinity. In the United States, baseball became the national past time, and in the United Kingdom, association football (soccer) enjoyed similar success, attracting mass, working-class followings by the 1920s. Schools, home hobbies, and sports created a new kind of masculine working-class disposition, less violent, more accustomed to moving within mass, bureaucratic structures, and less parochial and more attuned to national connections. Working-class sociability was also more strictly segregated by gender as daily leisure networks became formalized and commercialized. Most significantly, while this new world of sociability bridged divides between low wage and craft workers, as well as Irish and Protestant workers in the UK, it was precisely in these routine areas of daily life that racial segregation most forcefully bifurcated the working class in the United States. Segregated schools, social clubs, and amateur and professional sports leagues marked a working-class profoundly fissured by the reproduction of racist hierarchies in Pittsburgh and Baltimore.

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 Presented in Session 102. Race and Gender in Labor History