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Illa-9.1

THE END OF NOSTALG IA:

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF
INDIANA HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL
DURING THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
By

Troy D. Paino

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
‘ Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

American Studies Program

1997

ABSTRACT

THE END OF NOSTALGIA: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF
INDIANA HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL DURING THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

By

Troy D. Paino

The process of negotiation between producers and consumers
created a varied and complex set of cultural meanings in the
community support for high school basketball in the three Indiana
cities of Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle during the Progressive
Era. High school basketball became a way for people to imagine
community during a time of great change. As in other cities and
towns scattered throughout the predominantly rural and
homogeneous state of Indiana, excitement over the new sport of
basketball acted as a centripetal force in the face of emerging
centrifugal social, economic, and political forces. Witnessing the
dawn of an urban and industrial world that threatened their sense of
order, people of divergent socio-economic groups believed high
school basketball acted as common ground in a search for
community. As a result, fanaticism for high school basketball in
these three cities offers a unique look into the often contradictory
social responses to cultural change. In their support of high school
basketball, the people of these communities created a culture that
was at once compliant with and resistant to efforts at social

control by social reformers, educators, and industrialists.

COPYright by
TROY DALE PAINO
1997

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have felt the support and encouragement of many wonderful
people throughout my work on this dissertation. A few deserve
special mention because in one way or another their intelligence,
scholarship, work, friendship, and sacrifice have made this
sometimes arduous task one of the most rewarding experiences of
my life.

First and foremost, I would like to thank Peter Levine, the
director of my doctoral committee. Whatever success I might
achieve in my career will be in large part due to his example as an
immensely talented and compassionate scholar, writer, advisor, and
teacher. He has always been willing to take time from his busy
schedule to help me in any way possible. Even more important than
his role as my mentor, he has become a dear and valued friend.
Though he may have lost a step, his stroke from beyond the three-
point line is still the envy of this Hoosier.

I also want to thank the rest of my committee: Barry Gross,
Victor Jew, and Douglas Noverr. Each have sacrificed their time and
energy to assist me in the pursuit of my academic goals. You have
made this dissertation a cooperative effort with your support,

encouragement, and constructive criticism.

Friends like Eric Fretz, Paresh Malde, Shruti Vaidya, and Dan
and Erika Quiggins have provided me a true sense of community
while at Michigan State University. Due to these and other
friendships made, regardless of what the future holds, the years
spent pursuing my education in East Lansing has been time well
spent

The meaning of my friendship with Bryan and Patty Stow Bolea
expands well beyond both my experience at Michigan State and my
work on this dissertation. To thank them only for their support in
this endeavor trivializes the significance of their friendship on my
life. Having them live just down the road for most of my graduate-
school career offered a measure of companionship, contentment, and
happiness the like of which I will probably never experience again. I
miss you both.

I have been buoyed by the confidence my brothers, sister,
brother-in-law, sisters-in-Iaw, nephews, and nieces have had in me
as I pursued my dream. I especially would like to mention my oldest
brother, Tommy, whom this dissertation is partially dedicated to,
for his tremendous influence on my life. He has always encouraged
me with words of hope, love, faith, and grace just when I needed
them most. Now I only wish I had the words to comfort him during
his greatest struggle.

A special thanks goes to my parents, Tom and Lois Paino.
Though both were unsure about my decision to leave my law practice
to pursue a Ph.D. in American Studies, they never once tried to talk

me out of it. Just as they have done my whole life, they showed

v1

faith in me and continued to support me emotionally, spiritually, and
financially. I love you both.

Last but far from least, I want to extend my sincere and
undying gratitude to my wife, Kelly Paino. It is truly her love and
sacrifice that made this dissertation possible. My studies, this
work, and my life would have little meaning without her in it. Thank

you for giving me this opportunity to do what I love.

v11

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
THE MYTH OF INDIANA BASKETBALL ..................................................... 1

CHAPTER 1
ANDERSON, MUNCIE AND NEW CASTLE TRANSFORMED ................. 15

CHAPTER 2
A MOVE FOR CONTROL: PROHIBITION, THE YMCA,
AND BASKETBALL ........................................................................................... 39

CHAPTER 3
CREATING THE VIRTUOUS AND PRODUCTIVE CITIZEN:
BASKETBALL AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS .............................................. 70

CHAPTER 4
THE TAINT OF COMMERCIALISM ........................................................... 104

CHAPTER 5
SMALL TOWN VALUES AND BIG CITY DREAMS .............................. 133

CHAPTER 6
AN AMUSEMENT FOR THE COMMUNITY:
HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL AS AN EXPRESSION

OF CULTURAL RESISTANCE. ...................................................................... 173
CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HOOSIER MYTH ....... 193
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 211

V111

INTRODUCTION
The Myth of Indiana Basketball

Certainly nowhere in the United States is the sport
devoured by players and fans alike as in the Middle West, and in
no part of the Middle West more intensively than Indiana.

Folks there tell you that a Hoosier talks basketball for an hour
after he is dead and has stopde breathing.1

Raised in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Indiana, I am well
schooled in the art of basketball. Besides playing pick-up games
with my friends on the goal in my back yard for hours each day after
school, I religiously followed the exploits of the Indiana University
basketball teams of the mi¢1970s. During 1975 and 76, two years
the Hoosiers went undefeated during the regular season, nothing
seemed quite as important to me as basketball. If not for Scott
May's broken arm just before the 1975 National Collegiate Athletic
Association (NCAA) tournament, Indiana University undoubtedly
would have won back-to-back national championships. Instead, the
much-despised Wildcats of Kentucky barely beat the Hoosiers in a
”Sweet Sixteen” game of the 1975 tournament. But in 1976 the
Hoosiers returned Quinn Buckner, Bobby Wilkerson, Kent Benson, and
Steve Green, along with May, to dominate all opponents, including an
easy victory over the University of Michigan in the national
championship game. At age thirteen, as far as l was concerned, all

was right with the world.

Coach Bobby Knight's teams of the mid-70$ impressed
spectators with their discipline and teamwork. For fans across
Indiana they epitomized what Indiana basketball was all about: an
aggressive defense and a deliberate offense. But Indiana-style
basketball did not start with the Indiana University teams of the
1970s. Instead, the belief that Hoosiers played a distinctive brand
of disciplined basketball came from a long tradition of heated high
school competition. For many living in the state, Indiana high school
basketball since 1911 has symbolized a midwestern ethic of
dedication, self-sacrifice, and teamwork. More than just a game.
the way Hoosiers play basketball represents an entire value
system. '

Come February and March of each year, the Indiana High School
Athletic Association (IHSAA) single-class state tournament for
much of the twentieth century has taken center stage in
communities throughout the state. For those living in Indianapolis,
it has meant exhaustive television and newspaper coverage, canceled
classes for big pep sessions, and numerous banners made by
cheerleading squads decorating high school hallways. But for those
living in the smaller towns and cities scattered throughout the
predominantly rural state, it has meant much more. Driving through
a town like Franklin, Indiana, for instance, places of business are
decorated in school colors, church and Dairy Queen signs alike
encouraging the local boys to 'Win Sectional I' Cars in the street are

painted as if ready to lead a parade. By the first Friday of the annual

3
tournament, these communities practically shut down so everyone

can join in the support for the local team.

While schools from some of these towns have long traditions
of winning sectional, regional, semi-state, and state tournaments,
my school, Ben Davis High School, did not. So starved for a reason to
celebrate, the principal sometimes canceled school on the Monday
following our occasional sectional title. Surely a three-year high
school of almost 3,000 students should produce at least one state
champion. But seemingly every year I watched the “Giants“ (the
school's actual nickname) go down to the proverbial David either at
sectionals, played at a packed 5,000-seat Ben Davis gymnasium, or
at regionals, played at a nearly-filled 15,000-seat Hinkle Fieldhouse
on the campus of Butler University, previously called Butler
Fieldhouse, for years the home of the state finals, and made famous
as the site for the championship game in Angelo Pizzo's 1986 film,
Hoosiers. After one of these defeats the crowd stood stunned as the
father of our star forward jumped from about the fifth row onto the
back of an official that made a questionable call near game's end.
His inexcusable act of anger accurately expressed the frustration
many on the west side of Indianapolis felt over years of losing.2

During the 1970s, the years basketball had my undivided
attention, high school basketball, though waning, still had great
cultural significance in the state of Indiana. Even at a school like
Ben Davis that did not have a tradition of success, fans stood
throughout games in a packed, cac0phonous gymnasium in support of

the team.

4
Fan support at my school, however, paled in comparison to the

schools in the state's hinterlands that enjoyed an abundance of civic
pride in their team. Stories of these schools were part of the
basketball lore in Indiana and recounted by television commentators,
newspaper reporters, and fans each year at tournament time.

Possibly the most famous of these places is a region of Indiana
some refer to as "the Bermuda Triangle of high school basketball,”
comprised of Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle, located in the east-
central region of the state. As of 1992, New Castle reportedly still
had the nation's largest high school gymnasium with a seating
capacity of 9,314 people, remarkable for a town that has a
population only approximately twice this size. Anderson High School
had the second largest gym in the nation, seating 8,996, while
Muncie Central had the sixteenth largest, seating 6,576.3 Allegedly
New Castle high school games as late as the early-19808 boasted an
average attendance larger than that of the Indiana Pacers,
lndianapolis's National Basketball Association's (NBA) team.

The love of basketball in Indiana remains strong today, but no
longer is it merely centered around the exploits of the local high
school team. For many by the mid-1970s, support for high school
basketball transferred to Bobby Knight's successful Indiana
University teams. Knight's demanding, disciplined, and team-
oriented style of play embodied many of the values that so endeared
fans to high school basketball for decades. The one-time substitute
forward for the great Ohio State University teams of the early
1960s and head coach for Army during the mid to late 1960s fit

perfectly with Indiana basketball fans. He represented what many in

5
Indiana believed a coach should be: a tough, authoritative,

demanding, and confident perfectionist. With state-wide coverage
of every game on television and radio, Indiana University effectively
displaced high school basketball as symbol for the Hoosier myth.

As a youngster caught up in the excitement of two almost
perfect Indiana University seasons, I embraced the values this coach
and team represented. Whether by closely reading the sports page
each day, listening to television commentators, or through
discussions with my father, brothers, and friends, I learned that
Indiana basketball differed from what we derisively referred to as
“ghetto ball,” a style of game that supposedly placed style over
substance. Like baseball purists, Indiana basketball fans believed in
a traditional style of play. The pick and roll, bank shot, back-cuts to
the basket without the ball, a switching man-to-man defense,
constant passing and movement on offense, these were the
fundamentals of the game that should be religiously followed. Yes,
in Indiana we were (and many still are) basketball fundamentalists.
Dutifully following the fundamentals of the game represented a
midwestern culture that conservatively held to traditional values of
hard work, self-sacrifice, and merit. In this way the game of
basketball to Hoosiers was allegorical, a way to express a particular
belief system.4 The Indiana University teams of the 1970s became a
new and popular manifestation of this belief system first expressed
in the fan-packed high school gymnasiums on Friday and Saturday
nights thoughout the state a half century earlier.

The aim of this dissertation is to gain a deeper understanding

of the cultural meanings of Indiana high school basketball. To

6
accomplish this I returned to the early years of the tradition.

Basketball first came to Indiana by way of the state's Young Men's
Christian Association (YMCA) network in the 1890s. Shortly after
the turn of the century high schools around the state formed both
boys' and girls' squads to informally play teams from other schools.
The IHSAA, organized in 1903, did not get around to sanctioning a
state boys' basketball tournament until 1911. Girls, on the other
hand, were relegated for the most part to intramural competition.
The game's popularity grew steadily until after World War I entire
communities around the state started religiously following the
exploits of their local boys' high school basketball team. My
research covers the time Span between Indiana's introduction to
basketball in the 18903 to its enormous mass appeal in the 1920s.

For a close reading of the cultural texts of this period, I
restricted the scope of my research to those communities that make
up the Bermuda Triangle of Indiana basketball: Anderson, Muncie, and
New Castle. Separated from each other by only twenty miles,
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle offer a good opportunity to
uncover the various cultural meanings deeply embedded in Indiana's
passion for high school basketball. Following the example of Roy
Rosenzweig’s examination of working class leisure in Worcester,
Massachusetts between 1870 and 1920, this study seeks to avoid the
distortion or misinterpretation of local patterns committed by more
expansive histories.5

At the same time, there are limitations to such a study. In the
words of Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd in their famous

sociological study of Muncie in the 19203, Middletown: A Study In

 

7
Modern American Culture, ”a typical city, strictly speaking, does not

exist."6 Just as Muncie could not be considered a “typical“ American
city in the 19203, Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle cannot
represent typical Indiana communities between 1890 and 1930.
Consequently, drawing conclusions about the entire state’s love
affair with high school basketball from the study of only three
communities could lead to inaccurate generalizations. However, by
examining these three nascent industrial cities we can do what
Rosenzweig called 'test(ing) analytical categories - class,
ethnicity, and religion, for instance, which may prove useful in
examining other American (Indiana) communities, large and small."
Though not typical, many of the cultural and social patterns
experienced by these three communities during the Progressive Era
also existed in other towns and cities thoughout the state. The
industrialization, urbanization, and social fragmentation present in
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle at this time characterized much of
Indiana. Therefore, a close examination of the effects these trends
had on these communities can be used as 'a building block for more
general theorizing“ about their impact on the entire state.7

This study should not be mistaken for a history of sport. It
will not give a year-by-year account of how the Anderson Indians,
Muncie Central Bearcats, or New Castle Trojans did in the state
tournaments from 1911 to 1929. Nor will it focus on the exploits of
'star" players or successful coaches of these teams. Instead it
looks to determine why the people of these communities so
enthusiastically followed their local team. In search of the answer

to this question, I rejected models of cultural hegemony and social

8
control that argue the working class were passive recipients of

cultural messages from social reformers, educators, and
industrialists trying to create a disciplined labor force. Rather I
employ what Kathy Peiss described as a ”more complex picture of
cultural change as a multidimensional set of interactions, in which
hegemonic intentions are accommodated, resisted, and reshaped in a
variety of ways."8

After establishing the social and economic context of
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle just before and after the turn of
the twentieth century in the first chapter, I examine the role and
intentions of social reformers, educators, and business leaders in
introducing those communities to the sport of basketball in chapters
two, three, and four. By doing so, my research takes seriously the
hegemonic intentions and efforts at social control by the social,
cultural, intellectual. and economic elite in promoting James
Naismith's new game. But in an effort to demonstrate that cultural
transmission flows both ways, chapters five and six show how the
working class, broadly defined by an individual's structural
relationship to the means of production, reshaped, impacted, or
influenced the cultural meanings of high school basketball between
1911-1929.

To interpret the motivations and cultural meanings expressed
by the inarticulate is tricky business. Whereas the reformers,
educators, and even boosters often wrote down their social,
pedagogical, and economic agendas, the sizable working class that
helped fill the high school gymnasium to watch the local boys play
did not. Adopting Clifford Geertz's assertion that the concept of

 

9
culture is essentially a semiotic one, I consider everything under the

rather large umbrella of human behavior as symbolic action. To
interpret these various symbols, or cultural signifiers, I try to
imagine what peeple lived through and the formulae they used to
define their life experiences. As Geertz wrote, this is ”not an
experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in
search of meaning."9 The data employed to assist my imagination in
this interpretation includes descriptions of crowd behavior,
student-produced high school yearbooks, advertisments that relied
on an understanding of a community's zeitgeist for their
effectiveness, and the iconography that developed around Indiana
high school basketball in the 1910s and 20s. In addition, I use
patterns of language found in the daily newspapers to reconstruct
the cultural milieu of these three communities in the early
twentieth century.

The process of negotiation between producers and consumers
created a varied and complex set of cultural meanings in the
community support for high school basketball in these three cities.
High school basketball became a way for people, to borrow Benedict
Anderson's words, to ”imagine community“ during a time of great
change.” As in other cities and towns scattered throughout the
predominantly rural and homogeneous state of Indiana, excitement
over the new Sport of basketball acted as a centripetal force in the
face of emerging centrifugal social, economic, and political forces.
Witnessing the dawn of an urban and industrial world that
threatened their sense of order, people of divergent socio-economic

groups believed high school basketball acted as common ground in a

 

10
search for community. As a result, fanaticism for high school

basketball in these three cities offers a unique look into the often
contradictory social responses to cultural change. In their support
of high school basketball, the people of these communities created a
culture that was at once compliant with and resistant to efforts at
social control by social reformers, educators, and industrialists.

The play of the local high school basketball team reassured the
people of these towns and cities that their community could survive
and even thrive in the new economic order. The strength, sacrifice,
courage, and determination needed to be a good basketball player
also made for a good worker. In addition, the obedience and
cooperation needed for a successful basketball team made for a
productive workforce. These teams exemplified the sort of social
cooperation applicable to an industrial society. Whether it was a
player making that extra pass for a better shot or a substitute
willingly sacrificing playing time for the good of the team, the local
high school basketball team demonstrated the corporate morality of
the dominant order. In this way the people of Anderson, Muncie, and
New Castle during the years surrounding World War I gained a sense
of community by supporting the local team at the cost of complying
with the dominant ideology of industrial capitalism. ‘

A more pernicious result of this gained sense of community
can be found in the racist and sexist ideology embedded in the
cultural meanings of Indiana high school basketball. At a time when
the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a large membership in these three
communities and throughout the state of Indiana, the values

displayed by the local team often were exclusively associated with

 

1 1
the white, Protestant, and native-born culture. In addition, by

relegating girls to private, intramural, and a less competitive and
physical version of the boys' game, these communities continued to
endorse a subordinate role for women in society.

In other ways, the people living in these burgeoning cities
sought relief from the demands of industrial work by coming to
these games. Workers and their families could experience a release
from the rigors of a highly structured, hierarchical, bureaucratic,
regulated, and mechanized society. Akin to the pre-industrial
carnivals and festivals where customary roles were reversed,
hierarchies overturned, and social restraints suspended, high school
basketball games became an institutional way for those living in a
newly industrialized society to transform traditional values and
social roles. While the fans celebrated the values of the established
social and economic order as displayed on the court, they
simultaneously mocked them by their unrestrained and irreverent
behavior in the stands. In contrast to the team's style of play, the
fans acted particularly undisciplined, disobedient, selfish, and at
times recklessly abandoned.ll

In their nostalgic longing for a simpler time, racist and sexist
ideology, and social compliance and resistance to the dominant
order, the fans of Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle between 1911
and 1929 provide a glimpse into the origins of Indiana high school
basketball's cultural significance. The final chapter looks at how
this cultural significance continued until the 1950s. However, as
inner-city African Americans started dominating the game in the

19508 and 60s, many Hoosiers started having a harder time

1 2
imagining basketball as a link to a simpler, pre-industrial, and

homogeneous time. Robbed of its nostalgia, the passion for high

school basketball in Indiana started to wane.

 

 

13

Introduction Notes
1John R. Tunis,The American Way in Sport (New York: 1958), 83.

2Ben Davis High School finally found success in the 19905. They won
back-to-back state championships in 1995 and 1996, the last two
years of the single-class state tournament.

3Donald E. Hamilton, Hoosier Temples: A Pictorial History of
Indiana's High School Basketball Gyms (St. Louis, MO: G. Bradley, Inc.,
1993) 4.

4See Ronald Newlin, 'Middletown 8. Hoosier Hysteria“ in Indiana
Basketball History, Vol II, No. 4 (Summer, 1994): 6. Though Newlin
draws different conclusions as to the belief system basketball
represents, he makes the same claim that it is allegorical.

5See Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers &
Leisure In An Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).

6Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study In
Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), 3.

7Rosenzwelg, 4.

8Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in
Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1986), 8. See also, Gareth Stedman Jones, ”Class Expression
versus Social Control? A Critique of Recent Trends in the Social
History of 'Leisure',‘ History Workshop 4 (Autumn 1977): 163-170;
Stephen Hardy and Alan G. lngham, 'Games, Structures and Agency:
Historians on the American Play Movement," Journal of Social
History 17 (Winter 1983): 285-301; Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson,
eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post- War
Britain (London, 1976).

9Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic
Books, Inc., 1973), 5.

loBenedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso,
1983).

14

11See John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn
of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Mikhail Bakhtin,
Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene lswlsky (Cambridge: MIT.

Press, 1968).

 

CHAPTER ONE

Anderson, Muncie and New Castle Transformed

Indiana high school basketball's history technically begins
with the inception of the state tournament in 1911.1 With the
tournament came the community rivalry and athletic drama that are
so commonly associated with the basketball lore of Indiana. The
transition from agrarian to industrial economy around the turn of
the twentieth century contributed to why this game caught the
imagination of Indiana and became a symbol with which small and
medium-sized communities throughout the state could identify.
Basketball became a way for these communities to wrestle with the
fears they faced at the dawn of modernity.

Nestled amidst the cornfields of east-central Indiana are three
communities representative of this transition from rural village to
industrial city: Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle. Though small
villages like Chesterfield, Daleville and Yorktown dot the twenty-
mile stretch of State Road 32 between Anderson and Muncie, and
Mount Summit, Springport, and Oakville appear while driving the
twenty miles south on State Road 3 from Muncie to New Castle,
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle remain the cultural, economic, and
political centers of Madison, Delaware, and Henry counties.

To different degrees each town experienced the transformation
from small, rural trading center to small or medium-sized city

around the turn of the twentieth century. Many coming from either

15

1 6
the surrounding rural region or Appalachia to these developing cities

wanted to maintain the moral and social order of their agrarian
past.2 The traits of independence and self-reliance, typically
associated with working the land, somehow now had to be
transplanted into an urban and industrial setting that more often
than not meant salaried dependence for an ever-expanding working
class. The concentration of capital and the corresponding influx of
unskilled laborers made it more difficult to maintain these virtues.
Laborers in increasing numbers were turning to those vices often
associated with the corrupting influence of the city. According to
religious, social, and civic leaders, saloons, prostitution, and
gambling each represented symptoms of the moral decay that
accompanied urbanization.

The idea that Muncie represented life in the middle of change
at the turn of the century is not new. Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd,
in fact, named their famous sociological study of Muncie in the
1920s Middletown. The Lynds picked Muncie as a subject of their
study because of its 'middle-of-the-road quality."3 The transition
Muncie had recently experienced from rural to urban, artisan- to
industrial-based economy, and community cohesiveness to class
division offered the Lynds a chance to closely examine the social
order that more generally characterized American life in the 1920s.
The only change they did not care to examine was homogeneous to
heterogeneous. In their words, they were only interested in
examining cultural, not racial, change. Culture to the Lynds meant
jobs, homes, schools, leisure activities, churches, and social clubs.

The change they wanted to explore in these cultural institutions

1 7
related to the recent transformation in America's economy. Race,

gender, or religious and ethnic diversity were not the forces of
change that interested the Lynds. They instead focused on the
social and economic fragmentation resulting from industrialization
and capital concentration.4

Though some of their conclusions are subject to challenge, the
Lynds were right in picking Muncie as a city caught in the middle of
change. They could have just as easily driven 20 miles west to
study Anderson, a city that in many ways mirrored the development
of Muncie. Before a discovery of natural gas in Eaton, Indiana in
1876, ten miles north of Muncie, both towns were rural villages that
acted as trading centers for the farmers of Delaware and Madison
counties. Ten years after the discovery, when much of industry
became reliant on access to cheap fuel, civic leaders in these towns
initiated a concerted effort to capitalize on this region's supply of
natural gas.

The combination of the discovery of natural gas, late-
nineteenth-century industry's need for cheap fuel, and the desire of
civic leaders for economic expansion, all contributed to the rapid
growth of Muncie and Anderson in the 1890s. On February 24, 1887,
the Muncie Board of Trade organized with the purpose of promoting
"any and all undertakings calculated to advance the interests,
improvement and general welfare of the city of Muncie."5 In 1891
the city established a “factory fund” to help attract new companies.
By October, 1891 the city had raised $216,000 by private
subscriptions. With a matching pledge by companies already owning

real estate in and around the city, the Citizens Enterprise Company,

1 8
the organization formed to manage the fund, had nearly half a

million dollars to attract new industry. By January, 1892 this fund
helped attract no less than fifteen new factories that employed
nearly 3,000 people.6 Around the same time Anderson organized its
own Board of Trade that also set out to secure new factories that
depended on an abundant and cheap supply of fuel. As a result,
Anderson attracted several eastern manufacturers, such as Fowler
Nut and Bolt Works, American Wire Nail Company, the Union
Strawboard Company, and the Anderson Flint Bottle Company.7

The rapid economic growth of Muncie and Anderson that
resulted from the discovery of natural gas at the end of the
nineteenth century differed in degree and character than the sort of
expansion that would occur later during the first two decades of the
twentieth century. In the 1890s producers of glass dominated
Muncie's and Anderson's economies. In 1880 only four glass
factories existed in all of Indiana, in 1900, after the natural gas
discoveries around the state, there were 110. Muncie alone had six
new glass companies, the most famous of which, Ball Brothers, made
mason jars. Chief among the glass manufacturers that relocated in
Anderson during this time were the Pennsylvania Glass Company and
the Anderson Flint Bottle Company.8

Lured by the prospect of cheap gas, producers of iron or
fabricated iron "products also settled in this area. Like the glass
companies, Kitselman Brothers Woven Wire Fence Company, Midland
Steel, and the Whitely Malleable Castings Company in Muncie offered
employment opportunities to laborers that migrated from nearby

rural areas and southern states.9 Likewise, Anderson had attracted

19
38 new factories by 1892 and with a proliferation of iron, steel, and

paper manufacturers, the Anderson Democrat touted the city as the
“Pittsburgh of White River."°

As Muncie and Anderson entered the industrial age during the
last decade of the nineteenth century, most laborers saw a dramatic
change in the way they earned a living. No longer did most living in
and around these communities work as farmers or for farm-related
businesses. Yet the change in work did not involve the worker
alienation commonly associated with the Industrial Revolution.
Machine-based production would not dominate the economic order
until the automobile industry came to these cities a decade later. In
the mid-18908 most laborers worked as skilled mechanics in the
newly established glass and iron works factories.11 The blowing of
glass jars, for example, required great skill. With the teamwork of
highly skilled blowers and assistants, “the speed and rhythm of the
work were set by the human organism, not by a machine!“ Castings
in the foundry were also made by highly-skilled hand molders.
Though the nature of the work shifted away from the land and into
factories, laborers still worked with their hands in the process of
production. Despite the influx of factories into the economic order
of Anderson and Muncie, there remained a close nexus between the
worker and the product.

The supply of natural gas in the east-central region of Indiana,
however, proved to be short-lived. After 1900 Anderson and Muncie
could no longer look to an abundant supply of cheap fuel as the
impetus for economic expansion. In 1902 there were 5,820

productive wells in the area, in 1906, 3,523, and by 1917, only

2 0
1.830. As a result, the economic growth of these cities slowed

during the first years of the twentieth century. Many of the
companies that came to Anderson and Muncie from 1890 to 1900
either went bankrupt or relocated. Economic stagnation slid into
recession as the number of industries shrank and the value of goods
diminished. Three out of Muncie's six glass makers did not survive
the diminished supply of cheap fuel, and from 1900 to 1905 no new
companies came to the city. From 1880 to 1900 Anderson's
population exploded from a little more than 4,000 to over 20,000. In
contrast, from 1900 to 1910 the population grew by just over 2,000.
Muncie's population grew from around 5,000 to over 21,000 over the
last two decades of the nineteenth century, but from 1900 to 1910
only an additional 3,000 joined the city's ranks. The disappearance
of natural gas stalled economic expansion of the 1890s and made the
future of Anderson and Muncie uncertain.13

New Castle's transition from rural trading center to small
industrial city moved at a slower pace than its neighbors to the
north. Like Muncie and Anderson in Delaware and Madison counties,
New Castle emerged as a commercial trading center for Henry
County by the mid-nineteenth century. As Southerners migrated to
these towns in search of increased agricultural opportunity during
the 1820s, 305, and 40s, these towns began building the public
institutions, such as schools, necessary for further growth.

Just as it was for Muncie and Anderson, the construction of
railroads in the 1850s that connected New Castle to other trading
centers guaranteed its prominence in the economic life of the

surrounding rural area. Though the discovery of natural gas also

2 1
reached Henry County at the end of the nineteenth century, it was

not nearly as impressive as the find in Delaware and Madison
counties. As a result, New Castle did not experience the economic
boom that Anderson and Muncie experienced in the 18903.

Yet steady growth did occur, a result, in no small part, of the
concerted efforts of civic leaders to attract new business. An
article in the New Castle Democrat in 1903 recognized this

boosterlsm when noting that

Anderson, Muncie and other towns gave free fuel which is an
immense item. New Castle had little to offer that could not
have been offered by a dozen other towns in Indiana. What it
did have was a number of men of moderate means with
sufficient nerve and public spirit to invest money in ways that
would inure to the public good.14

Without the abundant supply of natural gas, New Castle had to rely
solely on financial incentives to attract new business. The town
trustees offered manufacturers exemptions from municipal taxation
for five years as an inducement to relocate in New Castle. As a
result, manufacturers of tools, furniture, and kitchen cabinets came
to do business in the growing trading center of Henry County. The
establishment of the Safety Shredder factor in 1899 marked the
beginning of steady progress that would last until the early 19203.
But while Anderson and Muncie approached populations of 20,000
people by the turn of the century, New Castle remained a relatively
small rural town of less than 5,000. Yet new companies like
American Shovel Works, Brass and Iron Bedstead Factory, Krell-
French Piano Factory, and the Hoosier Manufacturing Company
(makers of kitchen cabinets) helped create an industrial base that

later attracted part of the emerging automobile industry.15

2 2
On June 22, 1907 the cornerstone was laid for the Maxwell-

Briscoe automobile factory in New Castle. Maxwell-Briscoe, Krell-
French Piano, and Hoosier Manufacturing Company combined to
employ approximately 3,000 workers. During its heyday, the nearly
1,200 Maxwell employees cranked out an average of 5,000 cars each
year. New Castle’s population more than doubled between 1900 and
1910 with approximately 6,000 new residents coming there to live.
The area experienced a serious housing shortage and many of the
workers actually had to live in nearby towns like Spiceland or
Muncie.16

The automobile industry made its presence felt throughout this
region of Indiana during the first three decades of the twentieth
century. In Muncie at least seven different makes of cars, including
the Interstate and Sheridan, were produced between 1908 and 1928.
Later William C. Durant, organizer of General Motors in 1908,
located a plant in Muncie to build his Durant Motors Company's
Princeton automobile. In Anderson at least 14 different models
were built during this time. Referred to as the ”magnificent
Andersons," production of cars like the DeTamble, the Lamber, and
the Rider-Lewis changed the social and economic landscape of this
burgeoning industrial city. With this influx of auto plants, the
recession caused by the dissipation of natural gas in and around
Muncie and Anderson was short-lived. By 1910 new companies came
into these cities as quickly as they had left from 1900 to 1905. The
automobile industry and later the demand for goods created by World

War I contributed to a resurgent industrial economy.

2 3
The car makers came to all three communities for reasons not

unrelated to the natural gas discovery of two decades earlier.
Because of the first-wave of industrialization in Anderson and
Muncie, these communities had the labor force necessary to work in
the new automobile and automobile parts factories. New Castle's
close proximity to these cities and the aggressive efforts of civic
leaders that had earlier attracted smaller industry helped the city
join this economic expansion when Maxwell-Briscoe located there.
These new industries brought with them a more mechanized
and specialized means of production than the factories that located
in Anderson and Muncie during the natural gas era. The automobile
parts plants particularly relied on machine production methods.
Workers were now asked to perform highly specialized, monotonous
tasks the entire day only to complete one link in the long chain of
production. In short, the work lacked the considerable skill required
by the “blowers“ in glass factories and 'molders" in foundries. In
addition, the laborer never saw the process of production to its
completion. The pride that laborers once associated with their work
originally on the farm and later in the glass plants turned into a
feeling of ambivalence towards both the labor and the product. With
the passing of the apprentice-master craftsman system, the line
between skilled and unskilled worker became so blurred as to render
it practically non-existent. The Lynds noted that in 1924 less than
twenty-five percent of workers in Muncie's factories even paid
attention to their job. New modes of manufacturing devalued the
work, dehumanized the worker, and further separated the laborer

from the goods produced.17

24
This second-wave of industrialization and urbanization

dramatically changed the very nature of these communities. From
1910 to 1920 Muncie's population jumped from 24,000 to over
36,000. Anderson too witnessed another influx of people during this
decade with an increase in population from 20,000 to over 29,000.18
Meanwhile, New Castle's population grew to almost 14,000,
approximately four times its pre-industrial size. Though New
Castle's population never matched that of Muncie or Anderson, it
experienced possibly a more significant social and cultural
transformation with the establishment of the automobile factories.
Unlike Muncie and Anderson, New Castle had never experienced any
form of rapid economic growth. It now went through dramatic
social, cultural, and economic changes for the first time. No longer
moving to the rhythms of the farm, New Castle, along with Anderson
and Muncie, began marching to a technological beat.

After World War I several of the automobile companies located
in these cities either went bankrupt or relocated. This most
negatively affected New Castle when the Maxwell Motor Company
went bankrupt in 1920. Walter P. Chrysler stepped in and bought the
failing company and moved operations to Detroit. Fortunately the
industrial base of the community had become solid enough during the
intervening years to withstand the crushing blow of its largest
employer's departure. But with the failure of its major automobile
manufacturer, New Castle would never again witness the sort of
growth it experienced between 1907 and 1920.

Though Anderson and Muncie experienced a short recession

after the war due to the closing of several car factories, each had

2 5
several other large employers to fill the void. Primary among these

were the makers of automobile parts, companies that actually
flourished during the war by providing war materials. The Remy
Electric plant in Anderson exemplified the emergence of this new
type of industry. Founded by Frank and Perry Remy at the end of the
nineteenth century to manufacture magnetos and dynamos for
stationary and automobile engines, in 1905 the company expanded
after General Motors developed a Buick engine using these parts.
Despite going through some difficult years afterwards, the company
enjoyed its greatest success during World War I when it provided
war materials and employed 10,000 pGOple. In 1924 the Klaxon Horn
firm joined Remy to manufacture its product. Four years later
Delco, a firm from Dayton, Ohio, which produced the first electric
self-starter or cranking motor also joined Remy. That year Delco-
Remy also designed and produced the first electrical windshield
wiper. To insure the stability of the company for years to come, in
1928 the Delco car battery was put into operation, offering buyers
of automobiles for the first time the opportunity to buy a
replacement battery of the same make as the original battery.19 A
new Delco-Remy plant opened twenty miles down the road in Muncie
that same year to manufacture these batteries.

In addition to the new Delco-Remy battery plant, Muncie
attracted other manufacturers of auto parts. Henry Warner created a
differential gear and established his shop in Muncie in 1904. In
1928 the Warner Gear Company joined other auto parts companies to
create the Borg-Warner Corporation in Muncie. General Motors in

1919 opened its products division there to manufacture its

2 6
speedometers, steering gears, and transmissions. By 1935 an

estimated 50 percent of the city's manufacturers produced
automotive components. Even after the failure of the automobile
factories, Anderson's and Muncie's industrial base remained centered
on the auto industry for decades to come.20

The decade of 1910 to 1920, when the auto makers established
their factories in this region of Indiana, represented the time that
Muncie, Anderson, and New Castle most strikingly became separated
from their nineteenth-century agrarian-based economies. As the
decade progressed, a greater percentage of the labor force could be
categorized as unskilled industrial workers. Over 9,000 of the
16,000 laborers in Muncie in 1920, for example, worked for
manufacturing and mechanical industries.21 Despite the increase in
job opportunities, the laborers in these cities experienced downward
mobility as farm, skilled, and semi-skilled labor turned to low-
skilled mechanical jobs for employment. The nature of the work in
these new factories acted to level the status of the unskilled and
skilled laborer, thereby creating a more truncated social and
economic order by dividing the workers further from the business
class. The introduction of machines and assembly-line techniques in
local factories after the turn of the century caused a breakdown in
the craft hierarchy. As business class professionals like lawyers,
doctors, salesmen, clergy, and architects became more entrenched in
the cities' industrial and urban economic structure, the working
class, particularly the previously skilled laborers, experienced a

decline in status.22

2 7
As the Lynds noted, in the 19203 this cleavage between

working and business classes affected almost every aspect of
community life. The formation of these two groups, they believed,
constituted ”the most significant single cultural factor tending to
influence what one does all day long throughout one's life."23 Which
class you belonged to determined everything from what time you got
up in the morning to church and social club membership. Middletown
revealed that while the fate of the business class improved, the
working class suffered a diminished quality of life as a result of
Muncie's social, cultural, and economic transformation during the
first two decades of the twentieth century. Not only did work
become less rewarding and more alienating, but workers also
suffered a lost sense of control over their lives and an increasing
uncertainty about the future.

Like others living and working in the newly industrialized
North, workers in Muncie, Anderson, and New Castle increasingly felt
further removed from the forces that influenced their lives. As the
assembly line gradually replaced the craftsman as the primary
means of production, a growing number of laborers became subjects
of a tighter, systematic, and more centralized scheme of
management. By 1920 the new factory bureaucracy included
personnel departments, rational and precise cost accounting, central
planning offices, and production and efficiency engineers. Besides
the disappearance of skill in the new factory, the implementation of
scientific management increased the distance between employee and
employer and further subordinated the rhythms of work to the

exacting demands of efficiency.“

2 8
While the average number of hours per work week declined to

less than sixty and the work week decreased from six to five days,
the jobs of industrial workers in this region became less reliable
between 1890 and 1930. In the 19103 and 203 the working class had
to deal commonly with the “shut-down” or ”lay-off.” From month to
month the number of laborers working in the large plants of Muncie
varied greatly depending on the immediate production needs of the
manufacturer. The Lynds cited several examples of drastic lay-offs
during the early 203. One large plant employed 802 workers at the
end of 1923, yet only six months later the number decreased to 316.
Of those just 205 had worked continuously during that six month
stretch. During the first nine months of 1924 only 38 percent of
165 laborers interviewed had not lost some time from their jobs due
to shut-downs or lay-offs. Though constant work was a problem a
generation earlier, the frequency and unpredictability of these work
stoppages had increased.25

Laborers and their families whose livelihood depended on the
availability of work in large manufacturing plants increasingly lived
at the mercy of market fluctuations. Related to the truncating of
the craft hierarchy by the introduction of machine-based production,
the working class from 1908 until the 19303 experienced a decrease
in political clout. Except for the formation of a barber's trade union
in 1900, New Castle did not have strong organized labor until the
New Deal era. Muncie and Anderson, on the other hand, each claimed
active and forceful labor unions during their economic growth of the
late nineteenth century.26 However, both cities became Open-shop

towns after a strike by employees of Muncie's Union Traction

29
Company in 1908. The company-wide strike of its street and

electric railway employees turned violent and Republican Governor
James Frank Hanly declared martial law and sent 591 police officers
into Muncie to impose order. Though martial law ended after just
two weeks, the walkout continued another six weeks until the
workers finally capitulated. The first such act by the state
government since the Civil War, Hanly's intervention had a chilling
effect on unions in the region and throughout Indiana.27

The union's diminished power in these cities, however, had
more to do with the increasingly marginalized status of labor in the
production process than the action of Governor Hanly. Labor's power
had been displaced by the leveling of skilled and unskilled workers.
With the number of skilled craftsmen declining as reliance on
machine-based production increased, the trade unions of the late
nineteenth century suffered severe losses in membership between
1910 and 1930. The worker became a replaceable cog in the process
of production. Muncie, Anderson, and New Castle each had an
expanding labor force as the populations steadily climbed with the
continued migration from the surrounding rural region and southern
states. Working in tandem with the local Chamber of Commerce,
manufacturers would encourage this migration by advertising the
availability of work.28 In this setting labor lost its leverage to
force management to bargain. As indicated by the Lynds' account of
fluctuations in the workforce in several large factories,
manufacturers had the freedom to layoff or hire employees at will

depending on the immediate needs of the company.

30
Governor Hanly's ordering of martial law during the Union

Traction Company strike represented the growing hostility toward
the labor movement in Indiana during the first three decades of the
twentieth century. As the capitalist became the primary force in
the economic life of cities like Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle,
opposition to their newly imposed social order were routinely cast
in a negative light. The Lynds quoted an anonymous "city leader” as
saying

working men don't need unions nowadays.... We are much more

in danger of coddling the working men than abusing them.

Working people are just as well off now as they can possibly

[be] except for things which are in the nature of industry and
cannot be helped.29

ln Muncie, Anderson, and New Castle, as in other parts of the
United States in the 19203, the businessman emerged as the hero.
Individualism was the mood of the day. One got ahead by his own
efforts, not by the help of collective action. Especially in a region
of the country where Protestantism dominated the religious
landscape, adherence to the work ethic remained strong. Hard work,
self-control, and dogged persistence were still the ways to
independence, wealth, and status. People remained true believers in
a nineteenth-century ideology that declared this country a place
where man with "merit and industry“ could rise to financial
wealth.30 'By his labor a man worked out the position he deserved on
the economic ladder; it was the key to success in the business of
living."31 Collective action by workers ran counter to an ideology of

individualism that permeated this culture.

3 1
For many, communism became inextricably linked to the labor

movement. Though Indiana, like some other midwestern states, had
some active socialists, most notably Terre Haute-native Eugene V.
Debs, during the twenties communism was still viewed by most with
great suspicion and hostility. The overwhelming majority of
workers in America have never been particularly interested in
subverting the existing capitalistic economic order. The powerful
and unchallenged position of industrialists in American society
especially during the 19203 allowed them to diffuse any serious
ideological challenge. The most powerful union of this era, the
American Federation of Labor (AFL), exemplified the hegemonic
control of capitalists. The cry of AFL leader Samuel Gompers for
”more, more, more, now,” demonstrated labor's overwhelming
acceptance of capitalism's underlying principles. Gompers, in fact,
viewed his AFL as the principal bulwark of American capitalism and
democracy against communism. Gompers was not a radical; he
merely wanted a bigger piece of the economic pie for the American
worker. The union merely offered the worker a way to get his share
without the help of government.”

For the people flooding into Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle,
the philosophy of self-reliance made perfect sense. Though Indiana
lies north of the Mason-Dixon line, much of the state has a southern
tradition. The migration to east-central Indiana at the end of the
nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century came
from surrounding farms and the South. These people carried with
them a tradition of individualism, isolation, mobility, and suspicion

of northerners and city-dwellers that naturally impeded their

32
ability to act collectively. Therefore the workers of these

communities, like Gompers, put up little political resistance to the
social order industrialists so aggressively imposed.33 As a result,
the open shop became the norm in these three cities until the
Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and United Auto Workers
of America (UAWA) gained power in 1937 after a nation-wide strike
of auto workers.

Set in this context, it is not surprising that whenever
communists and radicals did get involved in attempts to organize
local workers, these communities reacted with great alarm. After a
raid of an Anderson mercantile establishment by the Department of
Justice in January, 1920 ended in the arrest of an Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW) activist, local papers reacted with shock.
Headlines on page one of The Muncie Morning Star screamed that
'Raids Reveal Revolution Plot: Reds‘ Plan Was To Use Big Strikes" and
"Search Anderson Den of Radical: I.W.W. Checks and 'Red' Literature
Found in Zimmerman's Establishment.“ These stories warned that
”the Communist and Communist-Labor parties” had sent agitators "to
every fertile field in support of a general strike."34 In retrospect
such a threat seems absurd. The obstacles to organizing any such
strike in Anderson, Muncie, or New Castle were tremendous. Even
the most conservative of labor unions found little support in these
communities. let alone the more radical IWW.

As the working class lost the psychological benefits from a
sense of craftsmanship and group solidarity that existed a
generation earlier, the business class participated in an ever-

increasing network of associations that provided both social and

33
financial opportunities and enhanced their community power. Civic

organizations like the Rotary, the local country club, the Chamber of
Commerce, and other professional associations, became important in
the social life of businessmen and their families. Though the church
remained the primary source of group association for both classes
during the 19103 and 203, alternative social institutions for the
business class increased at the same time they decreased for the
working class. This only contributed to the power differential
already present between workers and capitalists.35

As the transformation in the economic and social life of
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle continued, the divide between the
well-to-do and working class widened. From all indications their
paths traveled down increasingly divergent roads. This divide
presented itself both in the access to capital, the nature,
satisfaction and reliability of work, and in the choice of voluntary
associations and leisure. A laborer at the Remy Electric plant in
Anderson in 1920 might have worked on the assembly line ten hours
a day, five days a week, and, if fortunate enough to own a car, on
weekends take his family in his Ford or Overland to previously
undreamed of places.36 But with the exception of movies and high
school basketball games, they more than likely wound up somewhere
different than where those in the business class went. Whether
lodges or unions for men or social and cultural clubs for women,
voluntary associations assumed a less prominent place in the lives
of the working class. For them leisure increasingly became an act of
separation from the business class. When the working class did

participate in formal associations, it was done almost exclusively

34
with other working-class families. Though their children might

still mix with the children of the business class at school or the
local YMCA, the working class only joined churches, lodges, and
clubs with members of their own social rank.37

While the business class often formed associations around the
pursuit of strengthening business relations and social rank, the
working class during their spare time typically sought escape from
the work-a—day world. With the shortening of the normal industrial
workweek, laborers and their families had more time for leisure
activities such as vaudeville, movies, amusement parks, dance halls,
saloons, and spectator sports. In this context social reformers,
clergy, and industrialists saw the potential for licentious behavior
and the development of characteristics antithetical to the kind of
men they wanted to fill the work force. The solution to this problem
involved a two-pronged attack on the spread of behavior that
increasingly violated the genteel and capitalistic standards of the
elite. They waged a political attack on drinking, gambling, drugs,
and prostitution, while at the same time promoting a social reform
movement aimed to prevent future generations from succumbing to
these and other sins.38

Basketball played a significant part in this effort by reformers
to instill values of restraint, self-sacrifice, and courage into young
people. It also served to counter the feminizing effect of the
industrial city by developing physical strength in young men.
Finally, reformers used basketball to teach the young a corporate

morality relevant to the industrial world they faced.

35

Chapter One Notes

1As will be discussed later, the Indiana University Booster Club
actually sponsored the first state high school basketball tournament
in 1910. The Indiana High School Athletic Association did not
sanction the tourney until 1911.

2Most came from the rural regions of Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee
and West Virginia. See Frank, Carrolyn, "Politics in Middletown: A
Reconsideration of Municipal Government and Community Power in
Muncie, Indiana, 1925-35' (Muncie: Ball State University Ph.D.
Dissertation, 1974), 48.

3Robert S. & Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study In American
Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1929), 9.

4Lynds, 3-17.

5G.W.H. Kemper, ed., History of Delaware County, Indiana (Chicago:
The Lewis Publishing Co., 1908), 146.

6Muncie-~Past, Present, Future: The Muncie Land 00., (Sprinfield,
Ohio: The Winters Art Litho Co., 1892).

7J.J. Netterville, ed., Centennial History of Madison County: An
Account of One Hundred Years of Progress, 1823-1923 (Anderson,
Indiana: Historians' Association, Publishers, 1925), 248.

BNetterville, 248.

9Hoover, Dwight W., Magic Middletown, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1986), 2.

10Robert M. Taylor, Jr., Errol Wayne Stevens, Mary Ann Ponder, Paul
Brockman, Indiana: A New Historical Guide (Indianapolis: Indiana
Historical Society, 1989), 450.

11Muncie of Today: Its Commerce, Trade and Industries (Muncie,
Indiana: The Muncie Times, 1895) noted that most of the over 6,000
laborers in Muncie in the mid-18903 were skilled.

12Lynds, 41.

36

13Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1910: Volume II,
Population (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1913),
568-569.

14New Castle Democrat, April 17, 1903, vol. 26, no. 16.

15See Herbert L. Heller, Readings in the History of New Castle,
Indiana, Vol 1 (New Castle, Indiana: self published, 1941), The
Peoples Guide: A Business, Political, and Religious Directory of
Henry County, Indiana (Indianapolis, Indiana: Cline and McHaffie,
1874), Illustrated Historical Atlas of Henry County of 1875
(Chicago, IL: Higgins Belden & Co., 1875), Indiana State Gazetteer and
Business Directory, Vol. 5 (BL. Polk 8 Co., 1890), City and Rural
Route Directory and New Century Year Book Souvenir (New Castle,
Indiana: Courier Printing Co., 1901), and New Castle, Henry County
Sesquicentennial, 1822-1972, (New Castle, Indiana: Community
Printing, Inc., 1972) for general histories of Henry County and New
Castle.

16Greg Guffey, More Than a Game: A History of Boys Basketball in
Henry County (Hagerstown, IN: Exponent Publishers, Inc., 1990), 70-
76.

17Lynds, 39-52, 73-76. The Lynds discuss the nature of Muncie's
labor in the 19203 as compared to the 18903.

18Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1 920: volume ll,
Population (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1922), 316.

19Madison County Sesquicentenial, 1823-1973 (Anderson, IN: 1973),
56-59.

20Taylor, et al., 55.

21Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1920: Volume II,
Population, 316.

2283a Lynds, 23, Maurice R. Stein, The Ecliplse of Community: An
Interpretation of American Studies, (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1960), 51, and Scott Ray, "The Depressed
Industrial Society: Occupational Movement, Out-Migration and

37

Residential Mobility in the Industrial-Urbanization of Middletown,
1880-1925' (PhD. diss., Ball State University, 1981), 129.

23Lynds, 24.

“Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-
1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 25.

25|bid., 56-57.

2*3Ibid., 76. The Lynds explain that in 1897 thirty locals in Muncie
totaling 3,766 members were affiliated with the American
Federation of Labor. The city also vied with Detroit and other cities
as a labor convention city. The first chapter of the Women's Labor
League was also launched in Muncie.

27Taylor, 54.
”The Anderson Herald, March 8. 1923. 1-
29Lynds, 80.

30899 Matthew Hale Smith, Bulls and Bears of New York (1873;
reprint ed., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 541,
Calvin Colton, ”labor and Capital, " in The Junius Tracts, No. 7: Labor
and Capital (New York: Greeley and McEIrath, 1844), 15, and Henry
Ward Beecher, Seven Lectures to Young Men (Indianapolis: Thomas B.
Cutler, 1844) 20-21, for examples of nineteenth-century
expressions of the Protestant work ethic as key to economic
success.

31Rodgers, 13.

32Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American
Worker, 1920-1933 (New York: De Capo Press, Inc., 1960), 94.

33lbid., 40, 88. Bernstein makes a similar point regarding the
difficulties textile workers from Piedmont faced while trying to
organize in the 19205.

34The Muncie Morning Star, January 4, 1920, p. 1.

38

35Lynds, 75, 272-312.

36|bid., 253. The Lynds reported 6,221 automobiles in Muncie at the
end of 1923. This amounted to about 2 cars for every three families.

37lbid., 272-312, 332-343.

388ee Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and
Leisure In an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983) for an interesting examination of how the
working class created an “alternative” culture to the dominant order
through leisure and how through various reform movements social
and economic elites tried to restrict the influence and expansion of
this culture.

CHAPTER TWO

A Move For Control:
Prohibition, the YMCA, and Basketball

As urbanization and industrialization came to dominate the
social and economic landscape of Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle,
the Protestant churches of these communities joined a broader
Progressive Era reform movement that attempted to organize the
spare-time activities of youth, particularly boys. Fearing the
negative moral influence of the city, church leaders, with the
financial support of big business, wanted to provide the sort of
moral oversight thought more possible in rural villages.

Evangelical Protestantism gained strength at the same time
these communities began experiencing modernity's influence. As
historian Joseph F. Kett explains, this evangelism often aimed to
build "a moat around villages and towns” to protect against the
deleterious effect of the metropolis.‘ Church leaders and
industrialists wanted it both ways; they wanted the financial
rewards that economic expansion offered while maintaining the
moral and social control more common in a rural village. In short,
they wanted a large labor force that behaved and did as they were
told. This became an increasingly difficult goal to attain
considering the growing alienation experienced by much of the work

force as a result of the recent economic transformation of these

39

40
small and medium-sized cities. Faced with the drudgery and

unfulfillment of their jobs, workers increasingly used their leisure
time to escape from the imposed social and economic order.
Reformers consequently became convinced that the best way to
attain this goal of a disciplined work force was to socialize the
young, to mold them into the sort of moral citizens that contributed
to the economic growth of the city.

Social reformers like New Castle's A.W. Connor and Muncie's
H.A. Pettijohn became generals in the war against the growing "boy
problem."2 Faced with the growing drug and alcohol abuse among
young men and laborers, these reformers working within the 'Y'
movement used basketball as a weapon in the cause of developing
strong, muscular Christians and productive citizens.3 Like
settlement house workers, sociologists, and public school officials
in the burgeoning cities in the East trying to teach newly arriving
European immigrants how to be good Americans, social reformers in
the midwest working for the YMCA during the first two decades of
the twentieth century used games like basketball to revitalize the
physical and moral fiber of the first generation of young people
forced to grow up in the city.4 Even with the appeal of the new and
exciting sport of basketball on their side, victory for these men and
the movement they fought for was not assured.

The struggle between pro- and anti-saloon forces in these
communities exemplified the war between those working for and
against the efforts of these Christian reformers. Prohibitionists,
led by area industrialists, church leaders, farmers, and Republican

politicians, worried about the effect alcohol and saloons had on the

4 1
work force. The saloon represented the sort of vice many Christian

social reformers associated with the morally degenerative city.
Educators, ministers, and reformers worried about the saloon‘s
subversive effect on those institutions, such as church, family, and
school, that stood as the standard-bearers of nineteenth-century
genteel culture. The saloon became a symbol for the decline of
genteel cultural standards after the turn of the century. Instead of
promoting those Victorian virtues of moral integrity, self-control,
sober earnestness, and industriousness, the saloon presumably
encouraged debauchery and slothfulness. Alcohol served to corrupt
society and thwart Christian efforts to redeem the world.5

Motivated by a desire to create an alternative culture to the
dominant economic, social, and moral order, many workers sided
with Democratic politicians like Muncie's Mayor Rollin ”Doc" Bunch
that campaigned on a platform to resist efforts at social control by
Christian reformers and leading industrialists like Muncie's Ball
family. Central to this act of resistance was keeping the saloons
open and the alcohol flowingfi In Madison, Delaware, and Henry
counties the influence of farmers, industrialists, and reformers
were offset by the growing work force in the cities of Anderson,
Muncie, and New Castle. As a result, this region of Indiana became
an intense battleground for the fight over the prohibition of alcohol
during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Indicative of Progressive Era political efforts to control the
spare-time activities of the industrial work force, the 1907
Republican-dominated Indiana General Assembly passed laws

limiting the sale of liquor and cigarettes while completely

42
prohibiting horse racing, prize fighting, and slot machines. In

addition, they restricted hunting, barbering, and playing or watching
baseball games on Sunday. These laws signaled a battle over the
prohibition of alcohol in the state that would last until 1918, the
year Indiana went completely dry. Because a 1907 law permitted
individual counties to decide the legality of liquor sales within
county limits, the fight was waged mostly at the local level.

Delaware County voters utilized this legislation to vote the
county dry. ln reaction to this vote, Muncie voters later that year
elected Democrats to all Muncie city offices for the first time since
the Civil War. Without the significant farm vote from outside the
city limits, Democrats, with the support of labor and ecclesiastical
and legalist denominations, such as Roman Catholic, Episcopalian,
and the Church of Christ, garnered enough votes to seize political
control of the city. Democrats in Indiana at this time believed
strongly in the separate roles of church and state. As opposed to
Republicans, Democrats viewed society as not interdependent but
rather as composed of separate spheres. Government's role was to
protect this separation.7

The issue of prohibition in Muncie arose again in 1911 after
the Indiana General Assembly passed another law allowing
municipalities smaller than counties to hold local referenda on
liquor sales. Democrat-controlled Muncie decided to hold such an
election, confident that without the outlying dry votes the anti-
prohibitionists would win the day. Muncie was the largest city in
Indiana to hold such a referenda on liquor sales and attracted much

attention throughout the state as a result. Though the wets won a

43
closely contested election by a narrow 3,108 to 2,632 margin, the

battle over prohibition in Muncie and the neighboring cities of
Anderson and New Castle had just begun.8

With this defeat the reform-minded prohibitionists in
Delaware, Henry, and Madison counties stepped up their efforts to
close local saloons. Organizations such as the Henry County
Farmers‘ Institute resolved to protest against all liquor
establishments in New Castle.9 In 1913 New Castle had its own
referenda on the legality of liquor sales. Despite intense efforts by
New Castle's prohibitionists, the voters of New Castle, by the
narrowest of margins, decided to keep the saloons open. The New
Castle Daily Courier declared on the front page that ”temperance
men chose [the] lesser of two evils.“ The paper explained that voters
chose between keeping saloons open and having more downtown
buildings vacant. For a city interested in attracting new business,
people presumably did not welcome the prospect of existing
businesses closing down.10 Probably more relevant to the outcome
of this vote was the city's growing working class population.

During the campaign for a dry city the prohibitionists of New
Castle made their plan of social control clear. The Republican-
owned New Castle Daily Courier, acting as a mouthpiece for the
anti-saloon forces of New Castle, declared its editorial position
against the sale of liquor on the front page approximately two weeks

before the election:

. in New Castle three-fourths of the business of the saloons
of the city comes from the laboring men and mechanics and
that on an average one-fourth of the wages of those men go to

44

the support of saloons. It is equally true that the laboring men
cast three-fourths of the votes in the city.... when they fully

realize the relation of the saloon to their welfare, the end of
the saloon will practically be at hand.11

The controversial and openly pro-saloon Bunch's victory in
Muncie‘s mayoral election of 1913 exemplified labor’s desire to keep
the saloons open. As Roy Rosenzweig has pointed out about the
industrialization of Worcester, Massachusetts at the turn of the
twentieth century, the saloon emerged as a center of working-class
social life in response to a complex set of social forces: "tightened
work discipline, shorter workdays, intensified regulation of public
recreation, [and] increased working-class incomes."12

But any victories by anti-prohibitionists only served to
intensify the efforts of social reformers interested in stepping the
sale of liquor. The Anti-Saloon League of America became active in
all three of these communities. In Muncie the Ball family,
particularly Frank C. Ball, and the Kitselman family led the campaign
for prohibition. As the city's two largest employers, the Balls and
Kitselmans wielded much influence. They financed Anti-Saloon
League meetings, bringing in nationally renowned prohibitionists to
speak to hundreds of mostly business and professional men. In
introducing one such speaker at a March 2, 1916 meeting, Frank Ball
denounced the licensed saloon as a "blaster of homes and a retarder
of the progress of a nation."13 Speaking to fellow business leaders
and not those from the working class, however, it is doubtful these
meetings won many converts.

With the Ball and Kitselman families fighting for prohibition

and Mayor Bunch working against it, Muncie became a focal point for

45
this political fight. The drys in Muncie successfully petitioned for

another local option election in March, 1914. Though Mayor Bunch
openly supported the wet forces and used police officers to harass
dry sheriff deputies who monitored the voting, the drys won by 441
votes. The dry forces remained on the attack when in 1915 they
accused Bunch of conspiring to take bribes in exchange for allowing
slot machines in stores, twenty-five gambling houses, one hundred
establishments illegally selling liquor, and twenty houses of
prostitution within city limits. Bunch became the target of a grand
jury indictment and went on trial in the summer of 1916 on these
charges. Before Bunch’s trial there was yet another local referenda
on local saloons, this time by a petition from pro-saloon forces.
Wets won this time by a narrow 59-vote margin in an election
tainted by violence on both sides. The jury at Bunch's racketeering
trial deadlocked for forty hours before the judge dismissed them
despite testimony that the mayor owned part of a brothel.

Before the 1917 campaign for mayor, a grand jury again
indicted Bunch for allegedly hiring a man from Indianapolis to
dynamite the house of dry-activist Wilbur Ryman. Despite the 1916
trial and these new allegations, Bunch won the Democratic
nomination for a second term. Unlike his election in 1913, however,
the opposition presented a united front against Bunch in their
support for Republican candidate Charles 0. Grafton. The 1917
campaign between Grafton and Bunch pitted the efforts of social
reformers, industrialists, clergy, and other prohibitionists against
the working class and pro-saloon forces; between those trying to

impose social control and those trying to resist it. Bunch

4 6
campaigned as much against the powerful Ball family as Grafton. He

built a pro-working-class platform by calling for the eight-hour day
and by attacking the Ball family for trying to control the city. By
aligning labor against the forces of social control, Bunch won the
election by a landslide despite the fact he and much of his police
force faced the threat of more criminal trials. In fact, his 2,004-
vote majority represented until that time the largest margin of
victory in the city's mayoral election history.

Bunch's legal problems intensified shortly after his election.
After an extensive federal investigation, Bunch was tied to a large
mail fraud scam that bilked several victims out of money totaling
over $500,000. Chauncey Stillson and Elmer Gentry, two men with
prior criminal records as bootleggers and operators of
establishments illegally selling liquor, organized the scam. Working
from the Grand Hotel in Muncie's red-light district, they developed
an intricate eighteen-month-long plan to hustle $5,000 to $10,000
down-payments from investors for bogus land deals The plan
became so extensive that it required the participation of numerous
Muncie officials, including the legal protection offered by the mayor,
county prosecutor, and several police officers. In exchange for this
protection, the mayor and prosecutor received $500 for each
successful scam.

The image of Muncie became tarnished after news of the
operation became public. The presiding federal judge in the trials of
those Indicted declared Muncie “largely wicked."14 Ultimately Bunch
was fined $1,000 and sentenced to two years in an Atlanta

penitentiary. The State of Indiana went dry in April of 1918 as the

4 7
result of the Wright Prohibition law signed by Governor James

Goodrich. In 1919 federal prohibition went into effect and federal
authorities stepped in to try and enforce the Volstead Act in and
around Muncie for the next several years.15

Mayor Bunch's saga in Muncie symbolized the battle between
social reformers and an expanding and increasingly unruly working
class in all three communities. As urbanization and
industrialization became the social and economic order of the day,
the fight over defining the moral culture of Anderson, Muncie, and
New Castle intensified. lndustrialists, such as the Ball and
Kitselman families in Muncie, joined forces with social reformers
and evangelical Protestants to impose a social order that at once
supported an industrial-capitalistic economic system and a genteel
morality. All three groups worried about the degenerative effects
drinking, gambling, prostitution, and drugs had on the stability of
their communities. A 1912 front-page headline in The Muncie
Evening Press warned that the "Cocaine Habit Curse Grows..." The
story stated that the abuse of cocaine, opium, and morphine had
spread beyond the “colored race“ and into the local high school.16
Saloons, professional sporting events, particularly wrestling and
boxing matches, brothels, and growing red-light districts became
the targets of this concentrated social reform effort in reaction to
the growing influence of this counter-culture. lroncially, in 1917
the county prosecutor implicated in the land-deal scam a bit
righteously explained “this vice must be stopped. The legislature
has so commanded it and we... must exercise every care and diligence

that this great evil effectively shall be prohibited."17 If these

48
places, events, and activities could be eliminated or significantly

restricted, the working class would no longer have the opportunity
to participate in the sort of immoral and socially destructive
activities that most concerned the reformers. The political battle
over prohibition in these and other towns throughout Indiana from
1907 to 1918 exemplified this movement's campaign to abolish any
public space used by workers to challenge the dominant social order.
In its place the reformers wanted institutions that could be used to
instill the social values they desired. In Anderson, Muncie, and New
Castle, the YMCA became the primary institution used to achieve
this goal.

Concerned with what might fill the void left by the decline in
genteel cultural standards, Progressive Era reformers around the
country tried to monitor the expanding leisure time of workers and
their families with expert supervision. They instituted community
centers and recreation programs in cities to infuse leisure with
discipline and order. These programs focused particularly on the
youth because the future of American morality, they believed,
depended on them.

The YMCA, established in London in 1844, emerged as a
powerful institution in the Midwest during the Gilded Age when
American Protestantism turned from the revival to the structured
activity of institutions as its primary evangelical tool. Consistent
with Progressive Era reform, the new theological current
emphasized instilling moral rectitude moreso than a salvation
experience. Protestant churches focused on federating members,

particularly the young, into associations of self improvement and

49
recreation. Churches in the midwest during the mid-nineteenth

century played a relatively small role in organizing the social life
of towns and villages. By the early twentieth century, however,
churches organized the large majority of social events in these same
communities. The YMCA became the extension of these churches in
this effort to coordinate the spare time of youth.18

The YMCA started impacting Indiana communities during the
last quarter of the nineteenth century. As much of the state began
feeling the impact of industrialization and urbanization. business.
civic. and church leaders became involved in the work of this
reform-minded institution. Businessmen from Anderson and Muncie
established associations in their cities as early as the mid-1890s.19
But these local associations did not gain enough community support
to raise sufficient funds for YMCA buildings until after the
automobile industry sparked the more intense phase of industrial
growth in these cities. The YMCA embodied the growing concern that
the traditional methods of socializing the young no longer worked in
an urban-industrial setting.

In addition to oalisthenics and gymnastics, team sports
became an important tool for the Christian social reformers working
within the YMCA. For these reformers sports were seen as ”an
important surrogate for a rural upbringing, the disappearance of the
household economy. the absence of early work experience. the
weakened authority of religion, and the breakdown of the small
geographic community."20 In other words, sports played under the

supervision of YMCA physical directors offered an opportunity to

50
instill moral values associated with an agrarian past into

adolescents forced to grow up in an urban environment.21

As these cities grew, the need to build separate facilities for
the local 'Y' became more apparent to those interested in Christian
reform. During the summer of 1911 Muncie initiated a major fund-
raising effort for its YMCA. The Ball family donated over half of the
$200,000 raised. Later that year the YMCA acquired property and
made plans to build a new facility. Frank Ball, chairman of the YMCA
board of directors and vice president of the state organization, took
the lead in erecting the facility that was "far better than a great
majority of the YMCA structures in this country and [would] equal
any other in the world...."'t-’2 By 1916 after Muncie had a new YMCA
facility, its association could boast the second largest membership
in Indiana. Also, in 1911, due to the initiative of Friend's minister
Daisy Douglas Barr, Muncie formed a Young Women's Social and
Physical Betterment Association, later known as the YWCA. Five
years later the Ball family donated another $100,000 to Muncie's
YWCA building fund.

In 1918 Anderson too opened a state-of-the-art YMCA with the
help of a $125,000 donation from the estate of James Andres
Jackson Brunt, former director of the Anderson Bank and owner of
one thousand acres of Madison County land. Prior to Brunt’s gift the
Anderson YMCA struggled to get its feet off the ground. In 1893 the
YMCA state secretary for Indiana, E.E. Stacy, met with several area
businessmen in an effort to start an official association in
Anderson. But without a facility of their own, the meetings and

activities of this fledgling organization struggled to gain any

5 1
significant increase in membership. The fortunes of the Anderson

YMCA quickly changed after Brunt's unexpected gift. Brunt placed
only one condition on his $125,000 bequeath: “that the community
must match this sum with a like sum within a period of six
months..."23 The Brunt-Citizen's Building Committee, composed of
the city's leading businessmen, directed both the raising of money
for and the eventual construction of the new facility. This
committee promoted this fund-raising campaign with a promotional
entitled ”A Civic Movement to Meet a Civic Need: Two Hundred
Businessmen Make a Proposition.“ The headline 'How Would This, or
Better, Look in Anderson,“ read above a picture of the new Muncie
YMCA. This effort to raise an additional $125,000 aimed "to
purchase a site, erect and equip a building commensurate with
Anderson's importance and the value of her young manhood." The
promotional used quotations from Woodrow Wilson, William H. Taft,
and Theodore Roosevelt to illustrate the importance of a YMCA to the
character-building efforts of the community. Citing Taft, for

instance, the brochure extolled that:

A great Christian Association club, in an adequate building,
will keep men from drinking, gambling and other vices, by
offering an opportunity to spend unoccupied hours in a home
atmosphere, surrounded with good influences. The Young Men's
Christian Association has come to be recognized as a powerful
and necessary factor, both in business and government
matters.

In bold letters at the end of the promotional the committee declared
that “shops, stores and streets do not make a city - men make a
town.... That which raises the character of man, makes them better

physically, morally and mentally, makes a town better."24

52
The committee attained their financial goal and construction

on a new downtown YMCA facility began in 1917. Muncie's Ball
family was among the leading out-of-town contributors to
Anderson's fund-raising campaign.25 The front-page headline in the
March 2. 1918 Anderson Herald pronounced the new building ”The

Pride of Anderson.” The Herald's story went on to say:

The edifice stands, dedicated to all that is best in elements of
human progress; dignified. capable, hospitable, always in
closest touch with the affairs of its community. It stands for
broader education, proper physical training, practical religious
instruction. wholesome entertainment - and home. It stands
for so much, that Anderson citizens did not hesitate to place
their shoulder to the wheel, and roll this splendid cause to a
glorious fruition....26

After the construction of this facility, the Anderson YMCA
attracted more than 1.000 boys under sixteen years of age to join
and participate in swimming lessons. Bible classes. and basketball
leagues. At the same time. over 200 boys from seventeen to twenty
years of age joined the Hi-Y and Torch Clubs to participate in
basketball leagues and other competitive games to develop. in the
words of one promotional. "clean speech, clean sports. clean habits
and the effort to extend the highest standard of Christian living in
the schools and community."27

For several years New Castle could not raise the money
necessary to build a comparable YMCA facility. In 1921 New Castle
finally began planning for its new $200,000 YMCA building after
local businessman Paul Jamison donated land for its construction.28
Three years prior to its construction, Judge Williams from Marion,

Indiana, a small city about sixty miles north of New Castle, came to

5 3
town to speak on the importance of building a YMCA facility. He

declared that "the two greatest factors in developing the life of a
boy were the church and public school, but neither of these offered
that which can be obtained by an organization like the YMCA." Until
the completion of the YMCA facility, New Castle had to get by with a
substitute organization simply called the Young Men's Association
(YMA). But Judge Williams warned New Castle that the YMA must
develop into a real YMCA soon, or boys would become corrupted
beyond repair by such vices as picture shows and gambling.
Williams went on to say that due to modernity's influence, young
men had lost their "reverence and profound respect for the old."29
New Castle finally dedicated its new YMCA facility that included a
3,000-seat gymnasium in 1921.

Once established, the YMCA emerged as the primary institution
to restore a morally conservative social order. Though open to young
women, this reform movement focused most of its attention on boys.
As evidenced by Muncie's 1916 initiative to start a YWCA.
socializing young women was considered important, just not as
important as the need to instill Christian morals into young men.
This impulse developed from a perception at the time that men, not
women, were more at risk in the face of modernity's influences.3O
After all, mostly working-class men patronized the local saloons
targeted by the prohibition movement. In addition, the new
industrial social order of Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle had in
effect removed the influence of male role models from the home,
school, voluntary associations, and church. a fact believed to

negatively effect the maturation of young men moreso than young

5 4
women. With the decline of male supervision in these various social

institutions, reformers worried about the possible feminization of
young men, a national trend believed to extend back into the
Victorian Era of the nineteenth century.31 Also, young men now
looked forward to entering an urban-industrial workforce that
encouraged soft living and salaried dependence. This life stood in
stark contrast to the manly independence presumably developed on
the frontier.

More than just a refuge, the YMCA became a place where a
particular brand of masculinity could be instilled in young men.
YMCA directors, like Muncie's Pettijohn, taught boys to be strong,
muscular Christians. Reformers within the YMCA worried that the
young men of the city no longer developed the toughness, strength,
and discipline once learned on the farm. Therefore, during the late
nineteenth-century leading character-builders, such as Luther H.
Gulick and James Naismith of the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA
School for Christian Workers, promoted organized calisthenics,
gymnastics, and sport to take the place of work in demanding
disciplined effort of young men. As traditional social restraints
seemed to evaporate in the burgeoning city, organized strenuous
activity served as an "effective surrogate for the lost rural
experience."32

Character-building organizations like the Boy Scouts of
America and YMCA appealed mostly to those native-born American
families that had recently moved from the farm to urban areas, one
reason why these reform-minded institutions did so well in

Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle. In the context of the city,

5 5
historian David I. Macleod contends, ”fathers did not wield the same

overriding authority as the farmer-taskmasters." Without this sort
of oversight, character builders became concerned with the "raffish
promiscuity and fragmentation of urban life." Just like immigrants
in eastern cities, native-born Americans moving off the farm
experienced the disorienting effect of the city. YMCAs offered
“little islands of propriety” for those transplanted from rural to
urban areas, providing refuge from the cities' strangeness and
offering Protestant religiosity and sheltered sociability to young
men. In short, the YMCA supplied a counter to urban disorder by
restoring the moral order of the small community.33

As evidenced by relatively large memberships, YMCAs were
particularly successful in communities like Anderson, Muncie, New
Castle, and other small to medium-sized cities that dotted the rural
landscape of Indiana at the turn of the century. While the diversity
of larger cities placed limits on attempts by social reformers to
regulate the activities of youth, the small to medium-sized and
relatively homogeneous cities of Indiana offered both a substantial
number of young people and a cohesive civic leadership of boosters,
councilman, school officials, and clergy. While these three
communities experienced a tremendous influx of people from 1890
to 1920, their populations remained ninety to ninety-five percent
white. native-born, and Protestant.34 This shared ethnic and
religious identity between agents of social control and the working
class made it easier for the YMCA to ”coordinate the religious.
intellectual, social and physical life of the community."35

Reformers did not have to contend with a population fragmented by

5 6
race, ethnicity, or religious differences. One such social reformer,

William B. Forbush, recognized the advantage these medium-sized

communities offered:

If it be true, as I think it is, that the places in America in
which it is most desirable to live are the large towns and
small cities, one great reason why this is so is because it is
possible in such places to coordinate the religious,
intellectual, social and physical life of the community....36

By the end of the nineteenth century, the YMCA had become the
institution most actively expressing the tenets of "muscular
Christianity'.37 YMCAs throughout the country used classes in
physical culture to supplement and attract young men to their more
traditional Bible classes. Gulick particularly believed gymnastics
and team sports had a spiritual as well as hygienic value. Gulick
characterized Christ as forceful and dynamic, the first muscular
Christian, rather than meek or gentle, traits traditionally considered
feminine.

Gulick's philosophy developed not only from a fear of the new
social, cUltural, and economic order of the late nineteenth century,
but also from a desire to wed social Darwinism to religious
experience. Influenced by nineteenth-century religious
psychologists and philosophers like G. Stanley Hall and William
James, Gulick and other character builders believed adolescence to
be almost exclusively the time of religious experience. Adolescence
always represented the physical transition from childhood to
adulthood. If this stage of life was naturally religious, it followed
that in order to reach full maturity one must go through a religious

experience. This philosophy created a symbiotic relationship

5 7
between religious experience and physical development. One could

not fully evolve without the development of the other. Because of
this relationship it made sense to encourage young men to become
both spiritually and physically fit.38

The introduction of exercise and play into the YMCA curriculum
caused a boom in memberships throughout the country. By 1892
YMCA membership had grown to almost a quarter of a million with
348 gymnasiums and 144 full-time physical directors.39 Basketball,
a new game invented by Naismith while working at the School for
Christian Workers in Springfield, Massachusetts in December, 1891,
became a major force in this use of play to attract more young men
to the movement.

Representative of basketball's influence on the YMCA, Muncie's
association experienced a boom at the same time the game became
an important part of its social reform efforts. From 1914 to 1925,
the years director Pettijohn linked weekly basketball games with
weekly Bible classes, the association witnessed enormous growth.
It won first place in national competitions for the highest number of
diplomas awarded for successful completion of Bible study courses
for nine of those eleven years.“ In 1915, for example, the boys'
department of the Muncie YMCA proudly announced a membership of
565 boys in their early teens. Attendance in Bible classes for just
the month of October, 1915 totaled 1,519 young man.41 By early
1916 Muncie claimed the second largest YMCA membership in the
state, behind only the association in the much larger Indianapolis.42
Four years later the YMCA's weekly Bible classes had an average

weekly attendance of 699 young men. Probably more than mere

5 8
coincidence, attendance at the weekly Bible class basketball league

recorded an almost identical 675 boys.43 Pettijohn reported that
266 young men used the YMCA's facilities each day during 1920. By
the time the Lynds came to town in 1924, 118,117 boys had
participated in some activity at the YMCA during the course of that
year. The Lynds noted that the YMCA director was chosen for his
ability to draw the young people, "chiefly through athletics,“ to
membership in the association. At one Bible class the Lynds
attended, the teacher devoted five of the twenty minutes to teaching
the Bible and the remaining fifteen minutes to athletic talk.M
Naismith invented basketball as an indoor game for young men
at the Springfield School for Christian Workers to play during the
winter. Going beyond mere calisthenics and gymnastics, Naismith
aimed to create a game that appealed to young men's "play instinct."
Though Naismith, a graduate of Montreal's McGill University in 1887,
thought rugby the most exciting outdoor game, he believed that
tackling involved too much physical contact for indoor sport. He
began constructing a game that took elements from various outdoor
Sports, eliminating aspects of those games that did not work in the
context of a confined space. He concluded that most popular outdoor
sports used a ball, but in games like rugby and football, players ran
with the ball in order to advance it toward the goal. Because this
game would be played inside, Naismith needed to create a different
method of advancing the ball and scoring in order to eliminate too
physical of play. He concluded that the tackling inherent in these
games could be abolished if the ball were advanced by passing

instead of running. Also. in the interest of avoiding rough play, he

5 9
rejected scoring on or in ground-level goals, such as those in hockey,

lacrosse, soccer, and football. He reasoned that if the goal in his
new game was vertical, finesse rather than force would be required.
In addition, if the goal were above the player's heads, defenders
could not gather around the goal to prevent scoring.

With these fundamental principles in place, Naismith nailed
two peach baskets onto the lower rail of the balcony around the gym
at the Springfield YMCA. By chance the height of the rail over the
gym floor was ten feet, the regulation height of the basket still
today. Armed with thirteen simple rules, Naismith tried to direct
the unruly behavior of a group of "incorrigible" young men training at
the Springfield YMCA School for Christian Workers by playing the
first game ofbasketball in December, 1891.45 This game consisted
of nine players on each team, but at any given time half of these
players were relegated to a penalty box, similar to that in hockey,
for committing rule infractions. The game gained immediate
popularity among those at the Springfield YMCA, and within a couple
of weeks of the first game 200 people lined the gallery for daily
noon-hour games.

In a January 15, 1892 edition of the school's newspaper, The
Triangle, that went to other YMCAs around the country, Naismith
announced the creation of this new game in an article entitled
”Basket Ball." Though in his description of the game the number of
participants could vary, Naismith believed nine players on each side
was ideal. This, he contended, would allow for three defenders,
three center men, and three offensive men. By 1893 the official

YMCA rules suggested that teams consist of five men when the gym

6 0
was small, nine when it was large. In 1897 the number became

permanently set at five players per team. Besides determining the
number of players, within five years of its invention the YMCA
introduced an official ball, backboards for behind the basket, and
free throws as penalties for fouling. Because of The Triangle article
and the missionary work of the men graduating from the Springfield
School for Christian Workers, the new game of basketball spread
quickly throughout YMCA gymnasiums around the country. In these
gymnasiums the potential of this game immediately became
apparent. Basketball began attracting new members to YMCAs and
enhanced interest in the wider work of the local association. An
article in Physical Education in the summer of 1894 stated that
basketball had become the best tool in "maintaining the interest of
the members“ of YMCAs.46

Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle did not have adequate YMCA
gymnasiums at the time basketball first captured the imagination of
association directors and members. This limited the opportunity to
play basketball in these cities during the early years of the game. In
the 18903 New Castle remained a small, rural county seat, while
Anderson and Muncie were still in the very early stages of
industrialization. Without a large contingent of young people living
in an urban environment, the need for a large YMCA facility in these
communities had not yet become apparent. However, basketball did
find its way into the state's YMCA system by the mid-1890s. Though
it is uncertain when the first game was played in Indiana, it is
believed the Reverend Nicholas C. McKay, a Presbyterian minister and

Naismith's former student in Springfield, introduced it to the

6 1
Crawfordsville, Indiana YMCA in the 18903 and began promoting the

game as part of the association's physical education program. The
Crawfordsville and Lafayette YMCA teams played the first officially
recorded game in Indiana on March 16, 1894.47

It is less certain when young men began playing basketball in
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle. There is some evidence that in
Anderson, at least, young men started playing the game in 1897 in a
make-shift gymnasium on the second floor above the Rawlings-
Haynes Department Store.48 But the game did not become integrated
with the organized effort to socialize the youth of these
communities under the tenets of muscular Christianity until
Anderson and Muncie's second-wave and New Castle's first-wave of
industrialization between 1905 and 1920, the time each city waged
campaigns to construct state-of-the-art YMCA facilities.

Shortly after introducing basketball to young men, YMCA
physical directors around Indiana began developing teams to compete
against associations from other towns. Even in the case of New
Castle, which did not have an official YMCA facility with a
regulation gymnasium until 1921. the local association organized
teams to compete in state-wide YMCA basketball leagues and
tournaments. During the winter months from 1910 to the 19203,
YMCA basketball games received prominent coverage in the daily
press of Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle. In fact, until about 1916
the local YMCA basketball team received as much, if not more,
attention in the papers than the local high school team. After high
school basketball eventually replaced YMCA basketball in the hearts

62
and minds of fans around the state, YMCA junior leagues maintained

their prominence as a farm system for the high school team.49

Just because YMCA basketball gained popularity in these
communities does not mean players and spectators passively
accepted the proscriptive goals of the social reformers. As the
Lynd's observations suggest, the YMCA's success depended more on
the fun of basketball than the moral and social lessons the game
offered. Talk of basketball, and not the Bible, dominated the
conversation even at 'Y' Bible classes.so Though YMCA directors from
its inception linked basketball to godly principles, the focus on
basketball in these Bible classes indicated a passion for play over
scripture among the rank-and-file members.

YMCA league games acted as the forerunner to Indiana high
school basketball by teaching young men how to play the game and
introducing Indiana towns and cities to its potential as mass
entertainment. Just as young men did not play basketball in order to
hear Bible stories, spectators did not watch the games merely to
witness paragons of Christian morality. They came to observe and
join in the excitement of this new, fast-paced, physical, and
competitive sport. Inside the gymnasiums of YMCAs across Indiana,
players and spectators from the working class were given their first
opportunity to influence the cultural meanings of basketball, a game
meant to promote the conservative Christian and capitalist values of
Progressive Era reformers and businessmen,

At the same time, those values of teamwork, commitment,
self-sacrifice, and discipline social reformers meant to teach

through basketball were not necessarily rejected by the players and

63
spectators. Because basketball came to these communities as a part

of a Progressive Era Christian reform movement, many of the values
embedded in its production continued to find expression in the
playing and watching of the games. These values remained an
important part of basketball in Indiana even after it made the

transition from the YMCA to the high school.

64

Chapter Two Notes

1Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to
the Present (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977), 192.

2New Castle Daily Courier, March 13. 1915, 1.

3Muncie Evening Press, December 13, 1912, 1.

4See Peter Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the
American Jewish Experience (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 11-25; Donald Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 1880-
1910 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1983); T.
Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the
Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1982);
Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978).

5Philip R. VanderMeer, The Hoosier Politican: Officeholding and
Political Culture in Indiana, 1896-1920 (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press,1985)18-19, 105-106. ‘

6Dwight W. Hoover, “Mayor Bunch and the Sporting Life in
Middletown," Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Vol. 2 No. 1
(Winter, 1990): 4-15.

7VanderMeer, 99, 102,107.

8Hoover, 4-15.

9New Castle Daily Courier, February 13, 1913, 1.

10|bid., April 1, 1913, 1.

11lbid., March 15, 1913, 1.

12Rosenzweig, 36.

13Muncie Morning Star, March 3, 1916, 1.

14Hoover,15.

65

15See lbid., 4-15 for a review of Mayor Bunch's rise and fall in
Muncie politics.

16The Muncie Evening Press, December 13, 1912, 1.
17Muncie Evening Press, January 8, 1917, 1.

18lbid., 191-192. See Newell L. Sims, "A Hoosier Village: A
Sociological Study With Special Reference to Causation," Columbia
University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, 117 (New
York, 1912), 113-115. Sims sociological study of an Indiana village
in 1912 showed that in 1863 only 14 percent of the social events
reported in the local paper were sponsored by churhes. In contrast,
70 percent of social events in that village were sponsored by
churches in 1910.

19"The Early YMCA - 1893-1944,” History of Anderson Family YMCA:
1893-1993 (Anderson, Indiana: 1993).

20Benjamin G. Radar, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games
to the Age of Spectators (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-
Hall, Inc., 1983), 146.

”See Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790
to the Present (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977), 192 and Richard
Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social Conflict, 1888-1896
(Chicago, 1971), chapter 7 for a discussion of the perceived
differences in the cultural and moral values of small towns and
large cities during the Gilded Age. Both also discuss the movements
that emerged to challenge the negative influence of the city.

22Muncie Evening Press, December 9, 1911, 1.

23Young Men's Christian Association, 1893-1944 (Anderson, Indiana.
1944), 9.

2 4A Civic Movement to Meet a Civic Need: Two- Hundred Men Make a
Proposition (Anderson, Indiana: 1917) 1-6.

25Muncie Morning Star, March 10, 1918, 4.

26The Anderson Herald, March 2, 1918, 1.

66

27"The Early YMCA - 1893-1944,“ History of Anderson Family YMCA:
1893-1993, 17-18.

28Muncie Evening Press, March 11, 1921, 9.
29New Castle Courier, February 18, 1918, 1.
”New Castle Daily Courier, March 13, 1915, 1.

31See Ann Douglas, Feminization of American Culture (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

”Radar, 149.

33David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy
Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison, WI: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 6-10.

34in 1920 Anderson and Muncie, both twice the size of New Castle,
still had populations comprised of 92 to 94 percent white, native-
born and Protestant. See Department of Commerce, Bureau of the
Census, 1920 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1922),
316.

35William B. Forbush, The Boy Problem: A Study in Social Pedagogy
(Philadelphia, 1902), 73. See also Macleod, who argues that in small
towns and cities the dominate middle class felt threatened by big
city culture. As a result, adults tried harder to keep their young
people loyal to the values of the town.

36Forbush, 73. Kett also provides an argument for how the
demographics of small to medium-sized cities offered the best
environment for organizations like the YMCA to flourish.

3TThe term "muscular Christianity“ was first coined by the British
author and editor Leslie Stephens during the Victorian Era to
derisively refer to English cleric and novelist, Charles Kingsley, who
walked and rowed great distances for his health.

38See Kett, 202-205, G. Stanley Hall, “The Moral and Religious
Training of Children," Princeton Review 10 (January, 1882): 26-48;

67

Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Anthropology,
Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2 vols. (New York,
1905); and Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist As
Prophet (Chicago: 1972), 334-335, 416-418.

39lbid, 151-152.

4°Hoover, 81.

“Muncie Morning Star, November 7, 1915, 1.
“lbid., February 13, 1916, 1.

43lbid., January 13, 1920, 5.

44Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American
Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1929) 354, 396-97.

45The original rules of basketball, as listed in Naismith, Basketball:
Its Origin and Development (New York: Associated Press, 1941), 53-
55, were as follows:
The ball to be an ordinary Association football.
1) The ball may be thrown in any direction with one or both hands.
2) The ball may be batted in any direction with one or both hands
(never with the fist)
3) A player cannot run with the ball. The player must throw it
from the spot on which he catches it; allowance to be made fro a
man who catches the ball when running at a good speed.
4) The ball must be held in or between the hands; the arms or body
must not be used for holding it.
5) No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking, in any
way the person of an opponent shall be allowed; the first
infringement of this rule by any person shall count as a foul, the
second shall disqualify him until the next goal is made, or, if
there was evident intent to injure the person for the whole of the
game, no substitute allowed.
6) A foul is striking at the ball with the fist, violation of Rules
3,4, and such as described in Rule 5.
7) If either side makes three consecutive fouls, it shall count a
goal for the opponents. (Consecutive means without the
opponents in the meantime making a foul.)

68

8) A goal shall be made when the ball is thrown or batted from
the grounds into the basket and stays there, providing these
defending the goal do not touch or disturb the goal. If the ball
rests on the edge and the opponent moves the basket, it shall
count as a goal.

9) When the ball goes out of bounds, it shall be thrown into the
field and played by the person first touching it. In case of a
dispute, the umpire shall throw it straight into the field. The
thrower-in is allowed five seconds. If he holds it longer it shall
go to the opponent. If any side persists in delaying the game. the
umpire shall call a foul on them.

10) The umpire shall be judge of the men and shall note the fouls
and notify the referee when three consecutive fouls have been
made. He shall have power to disqualify men according to Rule 5.
11) The referee shall be judge of the ball and shall decide when
the ball is in play, in bounds, to which side it belongs, and shall
keep the time. He shall decide when a goal has been made, and
keep account of the goals, with any other duties that are usually
performed by a referee.

12) The time shall be two fifteen minute halves, with five
minutes rest between.

13) The side making the most goals in that time shall be declared
the winners. In case of a draw. the game may, by agreement of
the captains. be continued until another goal is made.

46For more information regarding the origins of basketball, see
Naismith and Robert W. Peterson, Cages To Jump ShOts: Pro
Basketball's Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
15-31.

47Herb Schwomeyer, Hoosier Hysteria: A History of Indiana High
School Boys Basketball (Greenfield, IN: Mitchell-Fleming Printing,
Inc., 1970) 5-6.

48"The Early History of the YMCA - 1893-1944,” History of Anderson
YMCA: 1893-1993. 9.

49On the sports pages of the daily newspapers in Anderson, Muncie,
and New Castle, the YMCA league games garnered as much if not
more attention than high school games until the mid-19103. Even as
late as the 1915-16 season, The Muncie Evening Press would
routinely feature‘the YMCA team rather than the high school team as

69

the top sports story. See the November 20, 1915, January 8, 1916,
and February 5, 1916 editions as illustrations. The Anderson Herald,
Muncie Morning Star, and New Castle Daily Courier likewise often
gave the YMCA league games as much if not more coverage during the
early years of Indiana high school basketball. In New Castle many of
the YMCA games were played as a double-header with the high school
game. See New Castle Daily Courier, January 31, 1913, 7.

5°Lynds, 396-397.

CHAPTER THREE

Creating the Virtuous and Productive Citizen:
Basketball and the Public Schools

Christian reformers, businessmen, and Protestant clergy were
not alone in giving moral instruction to young people forced to grow
up in an urban-industrial world. Public educators too worried about
how the new economic and social order affected the moral
development of children. Just before the turn of the twentieth
century the Anderson Public Schools went so far as to develop a
curriculum for "moral instruction.” In it the school system set out a
”course of study" aimed to teach specific virtues to students from
first grade to high school graduation. These meral lessons grew out
of a concern that ”many children receive(d) little or no moral
training at home, they attend(ed) neither church nor Sunday School,
therefore, if they receive(d) moral instruction at all it must be in
the public schools." The teachers were to instruct students in first
grade, for example, the virtues of obedience, kindness, and
unselfishness. Meanwhile a student in fifth grade learned industry
and ”its necessity, its benefits and rewards,” promptness, and
”economy and its relation to getting on in the world." By high school
teachers and students concentrated on the necessity of "duty to

family, duty to society, duty to state, duty to self and duty to God."1

70

7 1
Like the Christian reformers, public educators believed moral

instruction helped young people get along in and positively
contribute to society. Adopting some of the same principles
promulgated by YMCA social workers at the end of the nineteenth
century, educators believed physical education and participation in
sports like basketball taught lessons in public virtue. In a 1919 law
requiring physical education courses in Indiana public schools, the
General Assembly defined the aim and purpose of such classes as the
promotion of ”the more desirable moral and social qualities, such as
an appreciation of the value of cooperation under leadership, self-
subordination, obedience to authority, higher ideals, courage, self-
reliance, disciplined initiative, (and) self control."2

Physical education had already become an important part of
public schools' pedagogy during the nineteenth century. Throughout
the country elementary and high schools developed physical
education programs about the same time YMCAs utilized
calisthenics, gymnastics, and sport as a part of its social reform
program. In some parts of the country regularized systems of
physical education were introduced into the public school system as
early as the 18803. In Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle, however,
such programs did not become popular until around the turn of the
twentieth century. Especially as a greater number of children from
all social classes began attending high schools in these
communities, educators employed physical education to offer
lessons in social discipline.

Developed in the mid-nineteenth century, the high school

remained until the twentieth century a middle-class institution that

7 2
prepared youth for white-collar jobs. The demand for high schools

grew slowly. As late as 1890 there were only 200,000 secondary
students in the entire country. During the last decade of the
nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century,
however, public high schools in the United States witnessed a 711
percent gain in enrollment. Though still predominantly a middle-
class institution. by the end of World War I attendance in high
schools across the nation had reached 1.6 million. Many boys and
girls from lower-class families still had to quit school after eighth
grade in order to start work, but as the 19203 progressed and
compulsory school laws became enforced, secondary schools
throughout the nation became more democratic as 75 percent of all
high-school-aged students attended.3

The Lynds noted this trend towards students staying in school
longer in Muncie by pointing out that the city's population had
increased three-and-one-half fold from 1890 to 1924 while the
number of students graduating from high school had grown nineteen
fold. During the school year of 1889-90 there were 170 pupils in
the local high school, whereas by 1923—24 there were 1,849 pupils.
By the 19203 most of Muncie's children extended their education
past elementary school and into grades nine to twelve.

The high school, though common among those growing up in the
business class for some time, for the first time emerged as a
symbol of hope and progress for those in the working class. The

Lynds explained:

If education is often times taken for granted by the business
class, it is no exaggeration to say that it evokes the fervor of

73

a religion, a means of salvation, among a large section of the
working class. Add to this the further fact... that the high
school has become the hub of the social life of the young in
Middletown, and it is not surprising that high school
attendance is almost as common today as it was rare 3
generation ago.4

New Castle's Commercial Club, in a 1915 promotional, also
recognized that working class parents were beginning to view
secondary education as a means to a brighter economic future for
their children.5 Because of this belief and new compulsory school
laws, like Muncie, the New Castle schools witnessed steady growth
during the first two decades of the twentieth century. By 1925,
with a population of just over 15,000, New Castle could claim nearly
6,000 students attending its area schools. This number of enrolled
students is significant considering only thirty years earlier New
Castle's entire population only totaled 2,697.6

Anderson experienced similar increases in the enrollment at
its local high school. In 1889 Anderson reported only twenty-one
graduates from its high school. Because of the growing demand for
secondary education, the city opened a new high school building the
following year. By 1898 the high school had to move once again into
an even larger building. Yet another high school was built in 1910 at
the cost of $200,000 to accommodate the steady increase in
enrollment. By the 1906-07 school year, Anderson High School had a
total enrollment of 522 students, and from 1915 to 1922 the high
school experienced another seventy-five percent growth in
attendance. The high school built in 1910 could accommodate eight
hundred pupils; however, by the Fall of 1923 over thirteen hundred

students attended, forcing the school to hold two half-day sessions.7

74
Educators met this democratization of secondary education

with a pedagogy that aimed to prepare young people for jobs in the
industrialized economy. During the early decades of the twentieth
century tracking students into a diversified curriculum of academic,
commercial, and vocational programs replaced the traditional
justification for secondary education.8

Educators instituted a change in curriculum that aimed to
select and train students from various economic and social
backgrounds for different occupations. This philosophy embraced
both the democratization of secondary education and the dominance
of the modern corporation with its accompanying fragmentation of
work roles. Tracking and diversification of public education did
little to change the social structure of the emerging urban-
industrial culture; it rather mirrored and even furthered the
divisions in social class that accompanied the new order. Deciding
which students followed a vocational oriented curriculum was
largely based on, in what the United States Bureau of Education
called, “social heredity and destinies in life."9 Children coming from
a working class family most likely followed an educational program
that prepared them to work in a factory.

This vocational impulse in secondary education was felt in the
east-central region of Indiana. The Lynds noted that this change in
curriculum in Muncie concentrated on the development of “knowledge
and skill useful in sewing, cooking and using tools about the home
for the girls, and, for the boys, an introductory acquaintance with
some of the manual skills by which the working class members get

their living." The Lynds recognized that high schools were ”caught

75
less firmly than the elementary school in the cake of tradition and

now forced to train children from a group not heretofore reached“
had to consequently be more adaptable than the primary schools. The
most dramatic departure from the “traditional dignified conception
of what constitute[d] education“ could be witnessed in the
proliferation of classes that sought to ”train for specific tool and
skill activities in factory, office, and home.“ As the president of the
Muncie's School Board said in 1924, ”For a long time all boys were
trained to be President. Then for a while we trained them all to be
professional men. Now we are training boys to get jobs."10

As high school changed from an elite to a normative
experience, extracurricular activities were introduced as tools to
prepare adolescents of different social classes to participate fully
in an industrial society. The social and educational values of school
sports after 1900 reflected these main currents in school reform
during the Progressive Era. Educators embraced athletics as an
activity through which students could practice the sort of social
cooperation necessary in a corporate industrial society. Organized
team sports like football and basketball offered a highly
rationalized form of competition. Participants competed according
to firmly established procedures. Winning required teamwork and
acceptance of one's assignment from a coach. This meant that
cooperation for some team members even included acceptance of the
notion that for the good of the team they might not even get to play.
In this manner team sports emphasized a corporate form of
competition that paralleled the economic order these youngsters

soon faced.1 1

76
The reform efforts of the YMCA, not to mention the settlement

houses, Young Men's Hebrew Association, Educational Alliance, and
Playground Movement in cities out East during the late-nineteenth
century acted as a forerunner to this pedagogical shift in the public
schools. Luther H. Gulick embodied these efforts and their influence
on the philosophy of the public school's physical education programs.
Instrumental in developing athletics and team sports in the
evangelical and reform efforts of the YMCA at the Springfield,
Massachusetts School for Christian Workers at the end of the
nineteenth century, Gulick later founded the New York Public
Schools‘ Athletic League (PSAL) in 1903. Gulick sold the concept of
regulating interscholastic competition between New York City
schools to the board of education on the basis that properly
supervised team sports could improve the city's terrible slum
conditions. Gulick's biological theory of play assumed that the
negative effects of a bad environment could be at least partially
remedied through the ameliorative functions of sport. In Gulick's
words, athletics offered a way to “develop the idea of corporate, of
inter-institutional morality - that which represents the individuals
but includes them as a whole..."12

Just as Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle struggled to find
that middle ground between their agrarian past and industrial-urban
future, Gulick sought to balance the rugged individualism associated
with America's rural past with the new corporate morality of the
early twentieth century. Team sports became an ideal way to strike
this balance. Sports like football and basketball placed the values

of competition and the pursuit of victory in the context of social

77
cooperation. Instead of the rugged individualist, these sports

championed the value of the team player. Success in team sports
could only be attained by accepting common notions of fairness,
merit, and opportunity. Consequently, educators trying to promote
these values in the newly diversified high schools embraced
athletics as an opportunity for students to practice the virtues
taught in the classroom.13 In addition, many educators believed
athletics could help city boys build the sort of hard, rugged, and
muscular bodies that country boys once developed through chores on
the farm. Adopting the tenets of muscular Christianity, school board
members like General George W. Wingate of the New York City public
schools believed that physical strength was a necessary component
of masculinity and success in the business world.14

Employing these educational goals, newly established leagues
and state associations around the country at the turn of the century
sought to regulate and standardize interscholastic competition.
Though not as large as Gulick's PSAL in New York City, in April,
1903, a group of Indiana high school principals met in Richmond,
Indiana to discuss the organization of state high schools into a
single association for controlling athletic competition between
schools. Referred to as the "Richmond Agreement," the rules and
regulations agreed upon at this meeting paved the way for the
formation of the Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA).
Though other associations in Indiana had previously been formed to
regulate interscholastic sport competition, the IHSAA in 1903 was
the first state-wide athletic association. Though only fifteen

schools initially joined, by the end of 1904 seventy-one high schools

7 8
throughout the state had become members of the IHSAA. The

association experienced exponential growth over the course of the
next two decades, expanding to over seven hundred members by the
mid-19203.15

Originally the IHSAA developed its rules and regulations
around two major sports. track and field and football. Football's
popularity in Indiana at the turn of the century proved to be short-
lived as fear that the game was too dangerous for adolescent boys
increased. Not helping to alleviate these fears, in 1908 an Indiana
high school and collegiate football player both suffered fatal
injuries while playing. The 1909 minutes of the IHSAA Board of
Control reported that football had “fallen into disfavor around the
state because... the game [was] too strenuous for boys of high school
age, that it [had] become so specialized that it [had] lost all its
spontaneity as a form of recreation, and that it require[d] more than
a justifiable amount of skilled coaching." The combination of the
high cost to field a team and the decline in spectator interest around
the state made football unprofitable. In contrast, the low cost of
track and the increasingly popular sport of basketball proved more
profitable and appealing to students. By World War I football had
nearly ceased as a school sport in Indiana. The decline of football
during the decade before the war corresponded with the emergence
of basketball as the main team sport subject to regulation by the
IHSAA.16

Some high schools had formed basketball teams within a
decade of the game's introduction to the state's YMCA system. The

earliest recorded game between high schools was in 1901 between

79
Crawfordsville High School, home of the YMCA that introduced

basketball to Indiana, and Shortridge High School of Indianapolis.
Undoubtedly helped by their early introduction to the game,
Crawfordsville took two games from Shortridge and claimed the
mythical state championship. Interested in the social skills of
teamwork, discipline, and hard work it developed, several high
schools around the state employed the game as a part of their
physical education program for both boys and girls. Schools,
however, only developed boys' teams to compete against other
schools. From the start, girls were relegated to intramural
competition.

As the number of high school basketball teams increased and
competition between local schools started to claim the public's
interest, demand grow for an officially sanctioned IHSAA state
tournament. During the first decade of the twentieth century the
IHSAA refused to sanction such a tournament. concerned that such
intense competition only encouraged a win-at-all-cost mentality.
However, the IHSAA in 1910 did not publicly oppose Indiana
University's initiative to hold a state-wide tournament on its
campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The Indiana University Booster Club
created the tournament to help recruit players to the school. The
tournament divided the state into Congressional Districts and chose
one team from each district to participate. The IHSAA, while not
objecting to the tournament, never officially participated in the
organization of the event. Faced with the threat of diminished
authority in regulating interscholastic competition and concerned

with questions that arose regarding the process of selecting teams

80
and the eligibility of certain players, the IHSAA stepped in the

following year to officially sponsor the tournament. After receiving
input from all the high schools with basketball teams, the IHSAA
sanctioned its first state basketball tournament in 1911.17

The emergence of high school basketball in the state of Indiana
created an uneasy alliance between the YMCA and IHSAA. The YMCA,
as the original promoter of the game, still wanted to use basketball
as a means to draw young men into its fold. But the IHSAA wanted
high school athletes, particularly basketball players, to play
exclusively for the high school team. The IHSAA wanted to make
sure that public schools, and not the YMCA, were the primary
institutions that provided physical education for the youth of the
community. Once educators adopted physical education as an
important element in the education of young people, they acted to
become the exclusive disseminators of it.

This move for control exemplified the professionalization of
education during the Progressive Era. As Arthur L. Trester, General
Secretary of the IHSAA, said:

The high school is the institution that is supported by public
taxation for all boys and all girls. It is the permanent
institution in the community and is entirely responsible in a
legal way.... The rules and regulations of the high school
regarding athletic activities should be observed by other
organizations in the community as society has set aside a part
of itself called the school to do for society what it cannot do
for itself.18

Trester, a former math teacher in Alexandria, Indiana and
Superintendent of Schools in Martinsville, Indiana until 1916,

expressed the common view amongst public educators during the

8 1
Progressive Era that schools were the one institution that served

the needs of all young peeple. The non-sectarian nature of this
public institution presumably guaranteed a democratic quality to the
education administered within its walls, unlike the YMCA that
exclusively served the interests only of those that were willing to
join.

In 1911 the IHSAA Board of Control added Rule 7 to the
association's constitution that stated if "any member of a high
school athletic team... participates in an athletic contest as a
member of any other similar team the same season, [he] shall be
ineligible to compete under these rules for the remainder of that
season.“ The rule in effect squeezed out the competition from the
YMCA basketball leagues. However, because many high schools did
not yet have gymnasiums, the board made an exception for those
towns and cities ”whose students are forced by necessity to use a
YMCA, or some other gymnasium, for their practice games.“ The rule
went on to state that "it is a well known fact that the use of such
gymnasiums by high school students under such circumstances will
likely require that such students play on the teams of the
organizations maintaining such gymnasiums."19 Otherwise, the
IHSAA restricted high school basketball players to play only for the
high school team during the basketball season.

Yet Trester still worried about the YMCA and its efforts to
organize rival basketball leagues. He wrote that the public school
had to deal with “the large problem of the outside agencies and out-

of-school activities that are found in a more or less degree in all

8 2
school communities. Chief among these in cities is the YMCA and

YWCA"?0

Besides the goal of seizing control of athletics, the IHSAA also
limited players‘ participation in different leagues because of a
concern that young men were placing too much importance on sports.
During the early years of the IHSAA, the Board of Control stood
steadfastly behind the ideal that sports, though an important part of
the general physical education program of the public schools, should
remain merely a means to a larger end. Ultimately participation in
athletics served to build, in Trester's words, "moral stamina" in
those that participated. This amounted to instilling ”self-control,
courage, honesty, unselfishness and loyalty" in young people. In
addition, team sports taught “the ability to get along with others, to
play with others, to work with others and to be a member of a group,
a community, a state or a nation."21 It was a real concern of
educators at this time that sports like basketball might be viewed
as an end in themselves instead of as a means to these broader
social goals. Discouraging athletes from playing on teams for other
organizations presumably helped young people put games like
basketball into their proper perspective.

As spectators started to attend the games in relatively large
numbers, educators became even more aware of the dangers inherent
in organized athletics}22 J.T. Giles of Marion, the new President of
the IHSAA Board of Control in 1912, worried about the effects the
new emphasis on sports, particularly basketball, had on the players.
Giles went as far as decrying the new practice of hiring faculty for

the primary purpose of coaching athletics. He believed this

8 3
represented an unhealthy amount of attention on a small segment of

the school's population and sent the wrong message to players and

students. In his first statement as president, he stated that:

The members of the team are usually over-trained from the
standpoint of hygiene. and the hero worship accorded them is
not in proportion to the intrinsic value of their achievement.
It creates an erroneous standard of values... we believe that
the natural evils of organized athletics, such as the exclusion
of those individuals who need it most from participation, the
over indulgence and over specialization of those who do
participate, the danger of injury through accident and of bad
manners in play, are increased and exaggerated by the
prevalent high school system where teacher coaches are
employed, representative teams are trained, intense school
rivalry encouraged and the players permitted to win at any
cosL23

The IHSAA, in the tradition of the YMCA and PSAL, tried to
control and direct high school athletics so that they might serve as
a way to achieve broader social and educational goals. Therefore,
during the early years of its existence, the association's Board of
Control struggled to maintain the integrity and educational purposes
of the games while trying to eliminate potential drawbacks and
abuses. For the first few years after the IHSAA sanctioned the state
basketball tournament, the Board of Control achieved this goal by
following Giles' advice and restricting schools from hiring coaches
for any high school athletic team. In 1913 an amendment was added
to the IHSAA constitution that stated 'paid coaches, other than
those regularly employed as teachers by the trustees of the school,
are prohibited.” The amendment defined paid coaches as any person
who received, either directly or indirectly, “remuneration of any

kind, money, traveling expenses, gifts, etc., in return for services

84
rendered In instructing or coaching any high school athletic team."24

Like the restriction on players playing for other teams, this
amendment aimed to limit the emphasis school districts could place
on athletic events.

As the popularity of basketball spread rapidly throughout the
state, the IHSAA fought a losing battle. In 1914 a total of 77 teams
competed for invitations to the state finals in Bloomington, up from
37 teams the previous year. This growth continued for the next
several years. During the 1914-15 season 155 high school I
basketball teams competed for the championship, prompting Trester,
President of the IHSAA in 1913-14 and permanent General Secretary
for the association as of 1915, to note that “enthusiasm and interest
in the game and in the Association [has] spread all over the State."25
The following year over 200 high school basketball teams vied for
the championship. Joseph Shock of the Board of Control said, “the
season culminated in district tournaments that were highly
successful both as athletic carnivals of sport and pastime, and
financially."26 The Board's early efforts to keep control of the game
were getting caught up in the state's mania over high school
basketball. The educational goals of the game became blurred with
their obvious commercial potential. As the IHSAA tried to maintain
its earlier control, the tension between basketball as pedagogical
instrument and basketball as product in the new mass culture
increased.

By 1918 when Anderson High School made its first appearance

in the state championship game, nearly 300 teams entered the

85
tournament to compete at twenty different sectional sites around

the state.27 Over 4,000 spectators jammed into Indiana University's
gymnasium to watch Anderson play the defending champions,
Lebanon High School. The Anderson Herald reported that during the
closely contested game in which Lebanon won 24-20, the entire
crowd stood on their feet "in a state of frenzied madness of
excitement throughout the battle..."28 Just five years later, Muncie
High School made its first appearance in the state championship
game. By then, over 600 teams competed at 48 different sectional
sites in the hope of reaching the state finals now held at the
Exposition Building at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in
Indianapolis.29 Playing in front of nearly 15,000 people, Muncie lost
its first title game 27-18 to Vincennes High School. Muncie
supporters that could not make the trip to Indianapolis gathered at
the high school auditorium to listen to the radio play-by-play.3°

In just over a decade of the Indiana high school basketball
tournament, towns and cities like Anderson and Muncie had become
completely wrapped up in the performance of their local high school
basketball team. In a relatively short amount of time, high school
basketball had caught the imagination of people around the state. As
a result, more and more public pressure was placed on local school
boards and the IHSAA to facilitate this increased interest in the
games.

As the basketball tournament continued to gain popularity
around the state, the IHSAA increasingly filled a dual role. The
Board of Control tried to maintain the educational values promoted

by basketball while at the same time trying to increase the financial

86
rewards of the state tournament. Consequently, the IHSAA

advertised the games by making the case that the values taught by
high school basketball could also be learned by spectators. Those
watching the games too could learn the lessons of self-control,
cooperation, sacrifice, and dedication from observing two teams
demonstrate these values on the basketball court. Trester claimed
that “provisions for spectators as well as participants is highly
desirable as the educational values in moral, social and civic ways
gained by having men, women and children in attendance at clean
games and clean sport are very valuable to our citizenship."31
Educators working within local school systems and the IHSAA
marketed the games by exploiting the parallel universe of meaning in
which play, and basketball particularly, existed. Charged with
symbolic significance, young men playing high school basketball, in
Jackson Lears' words, ”embodied an imaginative connection to the
material world.” Lears has noted that the emergence of a consumer
culture early in the twentieth century contained "a new way of
ordering the existing balance of tensions between control and
release." While high school basketball offered people a release from
the structure of industrial life, it also symbolically represented the
dominant economic and social order.32 As the first promoters of
high school basketball as product for mass consumption, educators.
consistent with the pedagogy of public education during the
Progressive Era, effectively manipulated the impulse for release
into an affirmation of values consistent with industrial capitalism.
The construction of high school gymnasiums around the state

became a testament to the educator's effectiveness in wedding

87
larger educational goals with the popularity of basketball. By the

19203 the high school gymnasium became an important civic
monument to towns and cities throughout the state. Connecting this
popular team sport with the one local institution that apparently
transcended sectarian and class divisions proved to be a powerful
combination. Civic pride became inextricably linked with support
for high school basketball.

These large coliseums being built in towns and cities around
Indiana came to symbolize both the progress and cohesion of a
community. Until 1920 most high schools did not have adequate
facilities to house the growing interest in the games, so towns had
to convert churches, Masonic halls, opera houses, livery stables, and
barns into makeshift gymnasiums. Allegedly Swayzee, Indiana, a
small town ten miles west of Marion and about thirty miles north of
Anderson, constructed the first high school gymnasium exclusively
for basketball in 1912. But very few high schools could boast of
their own gymnasium with a standard-sized basketball court until
the 19203.

Because of this dearth of adequate facilities, the games were
often played in buildings with low ceilings and various obstructions
either on or near the court. Some gyms even had local rules that
allowed players to bank shots off ceilings and walls while others
had courts enclosed by chicken wire with no out-of-bounds lines.
Most gyms built during this first decade of organized IHSAA
basketball doubled as auditoriums. Other schools built separate
barn-like structures for the sole purpose of facilitating basketball

games. Most of the gyms built during these years, however, proved

8 8
to be inadequate for the growing popularity of the games. This

prompted a flood of gym construction around the state during the
19203.33

Frankfort, Indiana, home of the Hot Dogs, started an informal
competition between towns for the biggest and best high school
gymnasium. Howard Hall, completed in 1922 at a cost of $125,000,
had a seating capacity of 3,500. Two years later Martinsville
dedicated a high school gymnasium that sat 5,200, larger than the
seating capacity of either the Indiana or Purdue University
gymnasiums. Johnny Wooden, legendary coach at the University of
California at Los Angeles in the 19503, 603. and 703 and former
Purdue University All-American, guided the 1927 Martinsville
Artesians to a state championship in this gym. After the
construction of this gymnasium, communities around the state raced
to build large monuments to symbolize their devotion to high school
basketball. Boosters recruited local businesses and private citizens
to donate and raise money to build a facility representative of the
town's pride and progress.

The construction of the Vincennes High School gymnasium in
1926 typified how communities raised money to build a first-class
facility. A group of boosters created the Vincennes Public School
Athletic Association in an effort, as the local paper said, to ”relieve
Vincennes of its embarrassment in not having an auditorium of
consequential size.” One hundred twenty-eight local citizens,
mostly businessmen, each assumed personal liability up to $1,000
for the cost of construction. A consortium of local banks in turn

agreed to provide over $100,000 in loans. The Association entered

8 9
into a twenty-five year lease with the Vincennes school system that

stipulated net proceeds from all events held in the gym would go to
reimburse the bondholders. Once the bondholders were paid off,
ownership of the gym would revert back to the school district. With
a seating capacity of over 6,200, the Vincennes Coliseum had many
unique and unusual features. The 414 theater-style seats for
prominent boosters were the forerunner to today's luxury boxes. In
addition, the gymnasium had a maple playing floor shipped in from
northern Michigan and a $22,000 Wurlitzer pipe organ donated by the
local Kiwanis Club. At the time the largest high school gymnasium
in the country, IHSAA General Secretary Trester said at the
dedication that the building symbolized Vincennes’ community spirit.
During the twenties and early thirties over 100 new high school
gymnasiums were built throughout Indiana in similar fashion. In
1927, Trester estimated that the combined seating capacity for all
high school gyms at the time totaled nearly one million, or
approximately one-third of Indiana's entire population.34

Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle joined this mania over high
school basketball. The civic leaders of Anderson and Muncie
particularly got behind the efforts of their local high school
basketball teams during the early years of the IHSAA-sanctioned
tournament. Though Anderson High School had its own gymnasium
during the first decade of the tournament, by the early 19203 it
became apparent that the existing facility could no longer
accommodate the demand to watch the games. As early as 1917
Anderson routinely filled the 1,000-seat gymnasium to capacity for

each home game.35 During the first decade of IHSAA basketball,

90
Anderson High School could actually claim one of the better athletic

facilities in the state. As a result, Anderson began hosting the
district's sectional tournament in 1915, a matter that did not sit
well with Muncie boosters. Muncie believed that playing on their
own floor provided Anderson with an unfair advantage. The intense
rivalry between the two cities born from their fight for economic
dominance in the region during the 18903, manifested itself in this
struggle for tournament home-court advantage.36

During the tournament each year a standing-room-only crowd
well in excess of the 1,000 person capacity crammed into the
Anderson gym. The first year Anderson hosted the tournament in
1915, it generated more revenue at the gate than any of the other
sixteen sectional tournaments around the state. The IHSAA reported
ticket sales at the Anderson sectional totaled $997.35 that year.37
In 1916 Anderson placed second behind Martinsville, making
$1,112.30 from ticket sales.38 In 1918, the year after the state
tournament expanded from sixteen to twenty sectional sites,
Anderson was back on top, beating out Franklin and Martinsville with
receipts totaling 31.621.61.39 In 1918 the paper reported that a
"full and overflowing" crowd of ”enthusiasts from all parts of the
district" filled the “spacious gymnasium" for that year's sectional
tournament games.40 The Anderson Indians beat Pendleton High
School that year for the district championship and made it all the
way to the state championship game against the defending
champions, Lebanon High School. Giving a glimpse of the enthusiasm
many had for high school basketball in Indiana, The Anderson Herald

wrote, 'sensatlonalism of the first magnitude is mild when

9 1
referring to the Anderson-Lebanon game which resulted in the 1917

state champions slipping into the preferred berth for another
year.”1

As the tournament continued to grow, so too did the number of
sectionals. In 1917 New Castle earned the right to host its first
sectional tournament; three years later Muncie also began hosting a
sectional. With nearly six hundred teams competing in the tourney,
the IHSAA in 1920 had to add a regional tournament after the
sectional tournaments in order to reduce the number of teams
qualifying for the state finals. Indiana and Purdue Universities
hosted the regional tournaments while the IHSAA moved the state
finals to the Exhibition Building at the State Fair grounds in
Indianapolis.42 By 1923 there were over six hundred high school
basketball teams playing in forty-eight different sectional
tournaments around the state.43 This expansion sped up the race
amongst communities throughout Indiana to construct bigger and
better high school gymnasiums in order to win the honor of hosting a
tournament. Anderson, proud of its tradition as a host of the most
popular sectional tournament in the state, now had to compete with
a number of other towns in the east-central region of Indiana to
maintain its prominence and assure its future home-court advantage
at the sectional tournament.

Anderson consequently joined the race early to build a facility
specifically for high school basketball games. On February 1, 1922,
the principal of Anderson High School, R.R. Cromwell, gave the
Anderson School Board a detailed report on the public demand for a

larger gymnasium. As a result of this report, the board selected a

92
committee comprised of members from various civic organizations

to visit other communities and report on their methods of financing
and building such a facility.44 Representatives of the Rotary,
Kiwanis, Lions, and Independent clubs, as well as from the American
Legion, Chamber of Commerce, Anderson Public Schools and the
public at large concluded from their research that $65,000 would be
sufficient to construct a gymnasium that sat 4,000 to 5,000 people.
Their proposed plan consisted of raising the money by issuing bonds
that matured in no more than fifteen years at a rate not to exceed
six percent.45 The board responded by deciding if the "Citizen
Committee would raise $30,000 in cash by donations and sale of
tickets,” they would hire an architect and ”seriously consider the
construction of a gymnasium...”6 Within two weeks the committee
nearly raised the $30,000 from private subscriptions and ticket
sales and the school board hired the architect, E.R. Watkins. Four
months later he submitted plans to the board for a new gymnasium
with an estimated cost of construction at $196,676. Understandably
sticker shocked with this 200 percent increase in projected
expense, the board quickly stopped the plans to build and ordered the
raised money to be returned to the donors.47

Deterred but not defeated, the Anderson School Board returned
to the issue of building a new gymnasium sixteen months later. To
insulate the Anderson schools from liability, the board, like the
Vincennes School Board, incorporated the Anderson Athletic
Association to privately raise the necessary funds for construction
of the gym. This private holding company leased ground from

Anderson Public Schools for the duration of twenty-five years, on

9 3
which the gymnasium would be erected from funds provided by

donations, loans, and the sale of season tickets. Whenever the
corporation liquidated its financial obligation, the building and
grounds would revert to the school system and the corporation would
be dissolved. Upon this plan the Anderson Loan Association agreed
to loan the Athletic Association $40,000 to get the project started.
The loan was conditioned on the Athletic Association obtaining 150
persons to personally guarantee an aggregate amount not less than
$50,000!8 In addition to obtaining those to guarantee the loan, the
Athletic Association raised money by selling memberships to the
Association, selling season tickets for the 1924-25 season, and
acquiring $13,200 worth of personal loans from 90 different
individuals in and around the Anderson community. Altogether this
campaign raised $95,856.21. Instrumental in the success of this
effort was the participation of area factories like Remy Electric,
American Steel 8 Wire, Union Traction Company, and Nicholson File
Company, to name but a few, that each waged their own campaigns
to sell season tickets. ' Also important to this second effort was
finding a general contractor willing to build a 6,000-seat
gymnasium at a cost in line with the amount raised:49

Only eleven months after Anderson's Athletic Association
incorporated, the city dedicated the new 6,078 seat Anderson High
School Gymnasium on November 21, 1924. This new facility, later
known as the Wigwam in reference to Anderson High School's
”Indians" nickname, guaranteed Anderson's place as a sectional
tournament host for years to come. Not to be outdone, Muncie

hurried to make plans to construct an even larger gymnasium. At an

94
April 22, 1924 meeting, only four months after the Anderson School

resurrected plans to erect a new gymnasium. the Muncie School
Board resolved to purchase land and sale bonds ”to provide funds for
a gymnasium and building for physical training.'50

Like several other school districts around the state, the
Muncie School Board relied on the 1919 state ”physical education
law" as justification to build a new $100,000 gymnasium. The law
made ”physical education a necessary and integral part of the course
of study for all pupils enrolled in the elementary and high schools of
the state.” The board concluded that Muncie's high school did not
have ”an adequate building... for conducting such courses.” Why the
school needed a 5.000 to 7,000-seat gymnasium to meet the
requirements of this law is a bit curious, but the board decided to
sell 100 bonds for $1,000 each at 5% interest to raise the funds
necessary for a new facility.51

It is interesting that Muncie decided to erect a new gym
immediately after Anderson had adopted plans to build its 6,000-
seat coliseum. The initiative to build a gym also followed the
season the Muncie Central Bearcats made it to their first state
final, peaking the interest in high school basketball for thousands of
people living in Muncie}2 Other justifications aside, a group of
citizens "especially interested in the Central High School's
basketball team” actually started the campaign to build the gym 'to
take care of the large crowds that were anxious to see the
basketball games.'53

Talk of the new gymnasium could be heard throughout Muncie

during the Winter and Spring of 1924, none of which, incidentally,

95
centered around the need for adequate facilities to teach physical

education courses. According to The Muncie Morning Star, ”the
project was received probably more favorably than any other ever
broached in Muncie. Comment was almost unanimously in favor of
the gymnasium and the plan by the school board for financing the
project...."54 Two days after the board originally entertained the
idea of building a new gym, The Muncie Evening Press supported the

“school board's plan for a great coliseum and gymnasium,” writing:

It is not too much to say that thousands of persons have
been unable in the last few months— and it was the same way
in the previous two years- to attend the basketball games in
which the Central High School team participated. Many [who]
would have liked to see these contests- especially women-
have refused to enter the struggle for the tickets or they were
afraid to go to the crowded place in which the games were
played because they feared for their own safety. These will be
added patrons of the game if they are permitted to enter a
commodious fire-proof building such as that which is
contemplated...

Plans to build Muncie Central's new gym coincided with the
Lynds collection of data for their sociological study. As the city
coalesced around the achievements of the Bearcats, the Lynds
marveled at the significance of high school basketball in the lives of

its residents. They noted that:

during the height of the basketball season when all the cities
and towns of the state are fighting for the state championship
amidst delirious backing of the rival citizens, the dominance
of this sport is as all-pervasive as football in a college like
Dartmouth or Princeton the week of the 'big game".55

To the Lynds this enthusiasm for the new gym exemplified the
universal support for the Bearcats. At a time that the school board

voted not to hire an assistant for an understaffed school library

96
because the school district could not afford the $1,800-a-year

salary, it decided to go $100,000 in debt to build a new gymnasium.
They concluded that “more civic loyalty center[ed] around basketball
than around any other one thing."56

The plans to build the gymnasium in 1924 were put on hold as a
result of a remonstrance filed by the State Board of Tax
Commissioners against the School Board's bond issue at the request
of "a small and unpopular group of citizens."57 But four years later
the city rewarded the Bearcats' 1928 state basketball championship
with a new 7,500 seat gymnasium. No longer relegated to play at
the Ball State Teachers' College, the Bearcats now played in the
largest high school gymnasium in the country. Like Anderson, the
Muncie School Board justified this cathedral to high school
basketball on the principal that it facilitated ”vocational, health,
and physical education, and promote a properly supervised
recreational program for the school children of Muncie."58

During this second effort, Muncie followed Vincennes' and
Anderson's example and formed a gym construction corporation
called the Public School Extension Association. The Association
raised money by selling season tickets to five years worth of
Bearcat basketball games for $50. Eight-hundred fans bought
tickets, raising $40,000. School officials pressured teachers to buy
these tickets even though the expense amounted to as much as two
weeks of their pay. To cover the remainder of the $100,000
construction costs, the Public School Extension Association sold
bonds to the public at 5% interest. The school corporation then

entered into a fifteen-year lease agreement with the Association

9 7
for the use of the building. The building would then revert back to

the school after the debt was paid off. On December 7, 1928, Dr.
William Lowe Bryan, President of Indiana University, dedicated
Muncie Central High School's Vocational and Physical Education
Building.59

New Castle High School also built a new gymnasium in 1924.
This was the same year the state tournament expanded to fifty-two
sectionals and four regionals.60 Despite not having an adequate
facility for basketball games until that time, New Castle began
hosting its own sectional tournament in 1917 at the city-owned
coliseum that sat up to 1,000 people.61 Ironically, that was the
same year that the high school's yearbook blamed the poor showing
of the basketball team, in part, on the ”lack of a place to properly
practice."62 But with the increased competition to host sectional
tournaments, school officials thought it prudent to provide a
gymnasium capable of entertaining larger crowds. Even before the
construction of this facility, New Castle's sectional tournament was
routinely near the top in generating revenue by selling standing-
room-only tickets. But this new facility also guaranteed New
Castle's place as a tournament host for years to come. As the New
Castle High School's yearbook put it in 1919, ”school authorities
[saw] that it takes athletics to put a school on the map...."63 Five
years later the Maurice C. Goodwin Gymnasium, commonly referred
to as the Church Street gym, was completed at a cost of $75,000.
Though this gym did not match the giant arenas Anderson and Muncie
built in the 203, it did seat up to 2,000 people.64

9 8
These efforts to construct relatively expensive and large

gymnasiums for high school basketball symbolized the growing
influence of boosters on the sport. No longer produced only by
reformers or educators, private citizens, led by local businessmen,
joined in the promotion of high school basketball through their
financial and political support. As their role in the production of
these games grew as the 19203 progressed, high school basketball in
Indiana became a part of the emerging consumer culture that

characterized the decade.

99

Chapter Three Notes
1Manual of the Schools of Anderson, Indiana, 1898-1899, 6-9.
2School Laws of Indiana, “Acts of 1919, section 6609.“

3Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the
Present (New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1977), 183-189. Steven A.
Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the
Rise of Sports (Urbana, Illinois: The University of lllinios Press,
1989), 152. Between 1897 and 1921 several compulsory education
laws were passed, extending the age children were required to stay
in school. The 1921 law stated that children from ages seven to
sixteen that habitually missed school could be tried in a Juvenile or
Superior Court and declared a confirmed truant and sentenced to
either the Indiana boys' school, Indiana girls' school, or other
custodial institution. See School Law of Indiana, 1897 (RS. 1897,
sec. 6259), School Laws of Indiana, 'Compulsary Attendance,” (
March 14, 1913, Section 2), and School Laws of Indiana, 'Compulsary
Education and Attendance Officer” [Acts of 1921, Chapter 132] 286-
297.

4Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern
American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace .8. Company, 1929), 182-
183, 187.

5New Castle, The Rose City (New Castle, Indiana: New Castle
Commercial Club, 1915), 2.

6Herbert L. Heller, Readings in the History of New Castle, Indiana,
Vol. 1 (New Castle, Indiana: self-published, 1941), 1-8. New Castle
City Directory (New Castle, Indiana: R.L. Polk Co., 1925), 1.

NJ Netterville, ed., Centennial History of Madison County, Indiana:
An Account of One Hundred Years of Progress, 1823-1923 (Anderson,
IN: 1925), 199-202.

8See David Nasaw, Schooled to Order, A Social History of Public
Schooling in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979) for an analysis of the school and the labor market.

100

9"Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education,” US. Bureau of
Education Bulletin, No. 35 (1918), 8.

1 0Lynds, 190-194.

11Timothy P. O'Hanlon, ”School Sports as Social Training: The Case of
Athletics and the Crisis of World War I,“ Journal of Sport History
(Spring, 1982): 6.

1-"-‘Luther H. Gulick, 'The New Athletics,” The Outlook 98 (July 15,
1911): 599-600. For a review of Gulick's creation of the PSAL, see
Steven A. Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban
Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana, lllinios: University of
lllinios Press, 1989), 160-164.

13O'Hanlan, 10-11.

14Riess, 161.

15Dale Glenn, The History of the Indiana High School Athletic
Association, (Greenfield, Indiana: Mitchell-Fleming Printing, Inc.,
1976), 14-29.

16The Indiana High School Athletic Association: Sixth Annual Hand
Book and Report of The Board of Control, 1909 (Indiana: Self-
published, 1909), 4.

17Glenn, 62-67.

18Arthur L. Trester, "Athletics and Physical Education in Junior and
Senior High Schools: Viewpoint, Evaluation, Administration and
Supervision," (unpublished paper, written between 1915 and 1928
while Trester was General Secretary of the IHSAA) 93.

19IHSAA: Eighth Annual Hand Book and Report of Control, 1911
(Indiana: Self-published, 1911), 23.

20Trester, 38, 93.

21Trester, 16.

101

221' he major newspapers in Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle
typically reported about 200 to 300 spectators at YMCA and high
school basketball games before 1912.

23IHSAA: Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1912 , 7.
24IHSAA: Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1913, 55.
25IHSAA: Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1915, 7.
“IHSAA: Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1916, 8.
27IHSAA: Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1918, 25.
28The Anderson Herald, March 17, 1918, 1.

29IHSAA: Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1923, 12.

3°Muncie Morning Star, March 18, 1.

31Trester, ”Athletics and Physical Education in Junior and Senior
High Schools,” 60.

32Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: Cultural History of
Advertising In America (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 8, 11.

33Donald E. Hamilton, Hoosier Temples: A Pictorial History of
Indiana's High School Basketball Gyms (St. Louis, MO: G. Bradley
Publishing, Inc., 1993). 20.

34Hamilton, 30-34.

35The Anderson Herald, January 20, 1917, 6.

36The Anderson Herald, February 9, 1915. 6.

37The IHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1915, 21.
38The IHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1916, 27.

39The IHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1918, 25.

102

“Who Anderson Herald, March 9 and 10. 1918, 1.
41The Anderson Herald, March 16. 1918. 1.

4-”-The IHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1920, 8,
32, 61.

43The Muncie Evening Press, March 3, 1923, 5.

44Minutes of Anderson School Board, February 1, 1922.

45Minutes of Anderson School Board, February 17, 1922.
46Minutes of Anderson School Board, March 8, 1922.

"Minutes of Anderson School Board, July 6, September 15, 1922.

48Minutes of Anderson School Board, January 27, 29, February 4, 11,
1924.

49Dedication to the Anderson High School Gymnasium, November 21,
1924.

“Minutes of Muncie School Board, April 22, 1924.
51lbid.

521923 was the first year "Central” became a part of the school's
name.

53The Muncie Morning Star, March 5, 1924, 1.
54The Muncie Morning Star, March 6, 1924, 1.
55Lynds, 213.

55Ibid., 284, 485.

57Minutes of Muncie School Board meeting, May 27. 1924; Lynds, 285.

5IBIHSAA Handbook of Board of Control, 1928, 10.

103

59Hamilton, 32-33. Robert S. and Helen Merrill Lynd, Middletown in
Transition, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937), 291-
292. The Lynds explained that the effects of the Great Depression
made paying for the construction of the Muncie gym impossible for
the Public School Extension Association. The corporation incurred a
total financial obligation of $347,000 over fourteen years, and
"when the bottom dropped out and the 5 per cent interest [on the
bonds] threatened to be defaulted, there was plenty of local
sentiment to transfer the 'white elephant,‘ as the teachers call[ed]
it, to the school system." (218) The school district took over the
gym and its huge debt, using the building as a junior high school
during the 19303.

60IHSAA Handbook of Board of Control, 1924, 17.
61The New Castle Courier, February 7, 1917, 8.
62The Rosennial, 1917, 27.

63The Rosennial, 1919, 84.

64Hamilton, 43.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Taint of Commercialism

As the campaigns to construct new gymnasiums suggest. by
the early 19203 high school basketball had become a source of
community pride around the state. Many followed the local team
with religious zeal. In fact, religious faith and high school
basketball often became intertwined. In Muncie, big games were
often preceeded by prayer meetings for the team. During a closely
contested game in 1924 a Muncie Central senior class officer was
heard yelling, "Oh, God. We must win. Jesus, wilt Thou help usl"l
Even the architecture of the new gyms had a cathedral-like quality.
While typically copying the classical design of the German
gymnasium, many of these buildings also had features like ornately-
carved gothic facades evoking images of reverence. More than likely
most churches at the time envied the sort of dedicated support the
high school basketball team enjoyed each year during the annual
state tournament.

Consider Muncie's passion for their team as they prepared to
play Vincennes High School in the 1923 state championship. Before
the team boarded a traction car for the state finals in the Exposition
Building at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, area civic
clubs organized a "monster parade” that marched thousands of

citizens 'thrOugh the principle [sic] business streets, ending at the

104

105
terminal station.” The mayor issued a proclamation ”requesting that

all business houses be closed when the team leaves and that all
citizens take part in the parade." In addition, the proclamation
ordered factory whistles to blow and church balls to ring as the
train carrying “Muncie's hopes“ left for Indianapolis to compete with
fifteen other teams for the championship. Thousands of fans also
went to Indianapolis on chartered cars and filled a series of trains
on the state's interurban lines "with Central High battle cries and
yells."2

During the semi-final game on Friday afternoon against
Richmond High School, hundreds of people gathered at the high school
auditorium to hear radio reports of the game from the Muncie Press-
Smith Electric station, whose downtown office was also jammed
with anxious supporters eager to learn the outcome of the game. The
Warner Gear and Gill Clay Pot factories also received the radio play
by play coverage so their employees, whileworking, could follow the
game. When the Bearcats pulled out a close victory over Richmond,
the crowds broke into "unrestricted enthusiasm.“ ”Hundreds of
students and citizens headed by the victory bell paraded through the
downtown streets in a snake dance." The Muncie Evening Press
reported that “traffic was tied up, but who cared - Muncie had won."3

Muncie eventually lost the championship game to Vincennes in
front of approximately 15,000 spectators, 27 to 18. But the
community pride in the Bearcats did not go unnoticed by the

editorial writers of the Muncie Evening Press:

The Muncie Bearcats, the Central High School basketball
team which went into the finals of the state tournament

106

before being defeated, have done more to make a united Muncie
than any other influence since the patriotic one which
prevailed when the armistice was signed. These boys in their
"teens” have been worth more to the civic spirit of this
community in the last three weeks than the uplift movements,
the club conferences and the solemn conclaves of business and
professional men all rolled into one.

Throughout the two anxious days when the high school boys
were fighting their way toward the championship of the state,
all differences of opinion among the citizens appeared to be
forgotten. Republicans and Democrats, Protestants and
Catholics, Ku Kluxers and Knights of Columbus, millionaire and
pauper, officers of the law and breakers of the law, all were
brothers engaged in the support of a common cause....4

This idealized view of the city's support of the Bearcats, if nothing
also, demonstrated that many of those living in these communities
in the 19203 came to believe high school basketball transcended the
political, religious, or class divisions that pervaded several Indiana
towns at this time.

The game had come a long way from its middle-class reform-
minded origins of thirty-five years earlier. No longer played just to
instill certain values into young people, its popularity made it grist
for an emerging consumer culture's mill. Local business, industry,
and civic leaders increasingly became the promoters of Indiana high
school basketball, seizing control from Progressive Era reformers
and educators. Under the guise of ”civic pride," those with access to
capital used high school basketball as a means to promote the
economic expansion of their city.

As soon as the popularity of the game became evident, city
leaders saw the potential economic and political capital that could

be gained through high school basketball. The athletic associations

107
created around the effort to construct new gymnasiums offered a

formal way to further community support for the local high school
basketball team. These associations in effect took a significant
measure of control away from educators in the promotion of the
game. In the emerging consumer culture of the 19203, high school
basketball became another product capitalists could package and
market to the general public; the athletic association became the
means by which to achieve this goal.

Though still sanctioned and technically controlled by the
IHSAA, by the 19203 In communities throughout the state, the local
high school basketball team became a product of community
boosterlsm. Commercial concerns in many ways overshadowed the
educational goals of the game. A 1929 report by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching worried about the shift

in emphasis the construction of large gyms represented:

Some cases of ”high schools built around basketball courts"
may be found in Indiana communities, like, for example, Flora
with a population of 1,441, a high school enrollment of 90, and
a gymnasium seating capacity of 1,200; Martinsville,
population 4,895, enrollment 500, seating capacity 5,000;
Raub, population 258, enrollment 26, seating capacity 1,000;
Veedersburg, population 1,580, enrollment 126, seating
capacity 1,200....5

The high school basketball team in many Indiana communities, the
report warned, received more money and attention from politicians,
business leaders, citizens, and even school administrators than
traditional educational programs that served the entire student
bodyfi

108
These disproportionately large gyms symbolized how the high

school basketball team had literally become the center of attention
during the winter months for small and medium-sized towns
throughout Indiana. The gyms, along with the team, came to
represent the spirit of the community. At a time when a
predominantly rural state was trying to make the transition into an
industrial world, this demonstration of civic vigor became very
important. 9

Communities like Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle battled
against each other in an effort to establish themselves as the
economic and political centers of their region. A town that could
generate enough public cohesiveness and enthusiasm to construct a
large gymnasium communicated to the outside world that it was a
town prepared to successfully compete within the social and
economic order of industrial capitalism. After the Muncie Central
Bearcats won the 1928 state championship, for example, the
President of the Chamber of Commerce led the fight for the new
gymnasium because, in his words. "thousands of dollars could not
purchase the advertising these boys have given Muncie."7

Boosters in the 19203 believed that the notoriety of a
successful high school basketball program promoted a city's identity
similar to how many believe professional athletic teams do today.
Just as cities now hurry to construct new stadiums with luxury
boxes to keep or attract professional baseball, basketball, and
football teams, Indiana towns and cities in the 19203 looked for an
economic edge over their neighbors by building huge gymnasiums for

their high school basketball teams to symbolize their civic pride.

109
Once the gymnasiums were built, the boosters had to make

sure that the town remained enthusiastic for the team. Practically
speaking, these new facilities had to be paid for by future ticket
sales. The businessmen and political leaders that sat on the boards
of these athletic associations therefore had a vested interest in
making sure the stands remained filled until all loans were paid in
full. More importantly, it defeated the purpose of building such a
monument of civic pride if they could not fill it with spectators.
Unlike other monuments, these gymnasiums needed the assistance of
hundreds of screaming fans to serve its intended cultural purpose.
If not filled and teeming with excitement, the structure could
actually express the exact opposite meaning than intended. A half-
filled gym signified a community of unfulfilled promise; but the
same building filled to the rafters with screaming spectators
signified the community's pride, vigor, and potential. To guarantee
that the gyms served their intended purpose, boosters had to provide
a product the citizens wanted to consume. In other words, they had
to put a winning product on the floor of these new “temples” of civic
pride to assure people came and supported the team.8

The elevated status of coaches in the life of a school signified
how basketball had become a commercial enterprise. In pursuit of
building a successful high school basketball program under the
pressure of such boosterlsm, high schools throughout Indiana sought
the services of expert coaches. Even before 1920 the high schools of
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle began breaking the spirit of the
IHSAA's 1913 ban on paid coaches by hiring teachers primarily for
their ability to coach the basketball team. New Castle hired Frank

1 10
Allen in 1918 to turn around the fortunes of its basketball team.

During the early years of IHSAA basketball New Castle had little
success because, according to the high school yearbook, they lacked
a ”coach who could give the team sufficient attention." The relative
success of the team in 1918-19 was attributed to the arrival of
Allen, who “soon put New Castle on the state basketball map...."9
Coach Allen, however, moved on to greater challenges after he led
New Castle to the 1922 sectional championship over rival Muncie.
The increased pressure to win caused the tenure of high school
basketball coaches to be brief. While a losing coach was sometimes
pressured out of the job, a winning coach often left a school for a
more lucrative offer. Trester described this pressure when stating
that a coach's ”standing in the community depends upon winning or
making a very creditable showing“ in the state tournament.10

A 1927 article in The Indiana Teacher, a trade magazine for
educators, provided summary data about high scth coaches that
reflected both their elevated status and growing job Insecurity. The
average yearly salary of coaches from small high schools with less
than 150 students amounted to $1,590. The average yearly salary of
coaches from high schools with 151 or more students amounted to
$2,370. Ninety-one percent of coaches at these larger schools had
assistants that made an average salary of $2,152. The highest
yearly salary for any coach in Indiana at the time totaled $3,200.

The story never explicitly listed the average salaries of other
public school teachers at the time, but its obvious intent was to
reveal the relatively high salaries of basketball coaches. In

addition, successful coaches were often promoted to principals and

1 1 1
superintendents of the local school district. Conversely, the average

tenure of coaches at small high schools averaged less than two
years while the average tenure for coaches at the larger schools
totaled less than four years. So while coaches could demand
relatively high salaries and sometimes even the help of an assistant
or two, the pressure to win in the midst of the basketball-crazed
small and medium-sized towns of Indiana made these jobs extremely
demanding and tenuous.11

Indicative of this short job tenure, Allen left New Castle after
only three years on the job. His successor remained on the job for
only three years due to his inability to sustain Allen's success.
Orville J. Hooker, hired for the 1925-26 season, re-established a
winning program and led the team to a 1927 sectional title and
eventually to the 1932 state title. After New Castle lost to its
nemesis Muncie Central at the 1927 regional tournament, the
school's yearbook said Coach Hooker displayed ”tactics of efficient
coaching" and "displayed teams with a high morale in
sportsmanship.” It went on to describe him as “a splendid example
of manhood and as such has been an inspiration to his team.'12 The
high school yearbooks and local newspapers usually reserved such
praise for a coach that could produce winning teams.

Anderson too entered the search for basketball preeminence by
hiring acoach for the 1917-18 season that had already developed a
successful track record at Lebanon High School, the 1917 state
champions. The move to hire Alan Staggs paid off immediately as
Anderson High School won their sectional tournament and made it to

the state championship game in 1918 against the defending state

1 12
champions and Staggs' former team. Though they lost the

championship game, the high school yearbook gave credit to Coach
Staggs for building "the best team that Anderson High School ever
produced.'13 Though Anderson did not win a state championship
until 1935, the second year after Archie Chadd had taken over as
coach, Staggs had built a program that won eleven of thirteen
sectional titles and six regional titles from 1918-1930. The city
held Staggs in high esteem because of the job he did with the high
school basketball team. When in 1923 a rumor spread that Coach
Staggs might leave Anderson to coach at Notre Dame University, The
Anderson Herald worried that his departure “would sound the death
knell for Anderson High School basketball."14 Staggs did not leave
and Anderson built one of the state's premier gymnasiums and
established the reputation as a hotbed for high school basketball
around the aura of his success.

Muncie too went through its share of basketball coaches from
1915 to 1920 in search of a state championship caliber team. As
interest in the team intensified during these five years, Muncie went
through three different coaches. The school finally built a winning
program with Maurice Murray, who held the job from 1919 to 1926
and led the Bearcats during those years to the 1923 state
championship game, five sectional and three regional titles, and a
134-36 record.”

But this sort of success did not insulate Murray from the sort
of second-guessing Bearcat boosters engaged in whenever the team
struggled through stretches of uncharacteristically bad play. The

Muncie Evening Press gave a less than enthusiastic vote of

1 13
confidence for Murray during a short slump the team endured during

an otherwise successful 1923-24 season: ”Muncie's basketball squad
is getting a lot of advice it doesn't need. There is such a thing as
overdoing this advice business. Coach Murray should be and probably
is capable of giving all of it that the boys require."1‘s That the paper
chose the phrase ”should be and probably is' in reference to Murray's
coaching ability served to qualify the paper's editorial support in the
midst of the public's criticism.

Muncie found a more than capable replacement for Murray in
Raymond “Pete“ Jolly, who led the Bearcats to state championships
in 1928 and 1931. Under the combined leadership of Murray and
Jolly, Muncie Central amazingly did not lose a sectional tournament
game from 1923 to 1938. Besides the two state championships, the
Bearcats also won ten regional titles during this stretch. Like
Anderson and New Castle, the search for expert coaches paid off for
Muncie. All three cities established themselves in the 19203 as
communities that enthusiastically supported their successful high
school basketball teams.

The commercialization of high school sport was part of a boom
in American sport. The decade following World War I represented a
time athletics in general enjoyed growing popularity in America's
emerging consumer culture. Not just high school athletics, but
college and professional sports like baseball" and football also
experienced a boom in public support. Known as the Golden Age of
Sports, nationally renowned sportswriters like Grantland Rice, Fling
Lardner, Damon Runyon, and Paul Gallico assisted a burgeoning

sports industry by traveling around the country and pumping up

l 14
athletes, teams, and coaches in their articles with metaphor and

hyperbole. In doing so, they reinforced the idea that playing and
watching sports improved the national psyche with lessons in
courage and self-sacrifice.17 But as the interest in athletics grew,
so too did the concern over the ethics of amateur sports and the
institutions that governed them. From the professionilization of
amateur athletes to the influence of gambling interests, educators
and reformers worried about the deleterious effect commercialism
had on school sports.

In the 1929 indictment of college athletics by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Howard Savage, author
of the report, included a chapter 'specifically on interscholastic
sports and their relationship to physical education.18 Here Savage
expressed the dangers inherent in the practice of hiring teachers
primarily to coach athletic teams. Too often boosters working
within a school district's athletic association and instrumental in
selecting and paying the coach demanded victories of the coach and
his team. In addition, these boosters applied the pressure to win by
covertly hiring “professional or semi-professional" athletes in the
form of giving them positions ”in a local store or factory in order to
disguise his true relation to school athletics.“ Savage described
Indiana's enthusiasm for high school basketball as an illustration of
this form of boosterlsm. He wrote that 'in not a few towns, cities,
and even states, school athletics have become less an affair of the
school than an amusement for the community."19

During the 19203 when Trester was going around the state

dedicating new high school gyms, he too acknowledged that the

1 15
IHSAA had to guard against the 'evil of commercialism' and

“professionalism“ in high school athletics.20 With a master's degree
in education from Columbia University, friend of John Dewey, former
math teacher, principal, and superintendent of schools in
Martinsville, Indiana, Trester was fully cognizant of the pedagogical
origins of school athletics. Yet by endorsing the efforts of
communities to build these gyms, Trester and the IHSAA placed their
stamp of approval on the sort of boosterism Savage warned against
in his report when he wrote: "A community that finances the
construction of a fine high school building out of the profits of
basketball is in danger of capitalizing the excitement of the
spectators and the notoriety of the players"?1 Trester encouraged
the construction of these gyms, typically promoted and controlled by
privately run athletic associations and financed through ticket
sales.22

Under Trester's leadership, the IHSAA evolved from a body of
educators with relatively little power trying to keep school sport
true to its educational goals and free of commercialism to a
remarkably autonomous and powerful body of athletic
administrators who encouraged high school basketball as a source
for intercommunity competition and mass entertainment.“3 Trester
worked hard making the state tournament the spectacle Naismith
marveled at after watching the 1925 Indiana high school
championship game with 15,000 other fans.24 Trester initiated the
construction of the Butler Fieldhouse on the campus of Indianapolis's
Butler University to assure an adequate facility to accommodate the

growing interest in the state finals. A long-term lease between the

1 16
IHSAA and Butler made it possible for the school to finance the

construction of an $800,000, 15,000-seat facility that at the time
was the largest basketball gymnasium in the nation and would host
the state finals from 1928 until 1971. Trester and the IHSAA later
contributed money to expand the facility in 1933.25 By this act the
IHSAA had in effect supported the commercialization of high school
basketball.

it seems hard to believe that just a decade prior to the
gymnasium boom of the 19203, J.T. Giles, President of the IHSAA in
1912, warned, ”The practice of developing one team of trained
specialists for the high school cannot be successfully defended on
any ground."26 That same year the out-going IHSAA President, LE.
Neff, praised teaching basketball in the high schools only because ”it
encouraged the formation of many teams in the same school, and
offered the finest kind of exercise and recreation to both the skilled
and unskilled, to girls as well as to boys."27 Both Giles and Neff
foresaw the dangers of community involvement with school sports
and warned the IHSAA Board of Control to guard against a misplaced
emphasis on team sports that trained but a few at the cost of not
providing proper physical education to the entire student body. As
1918 IHSAA President E.E. Ramsey said in the spirit of the military
preparedness movement, "it is not improbable that our athletic
programs are too heavy and our physical education programs too
light,“ noting the selective quality of athletics and the participatory
nature of physical education?8

Despite their warnings, the 19203 saw the tension between

the growing spectacle of high school basketball and the traditional

1 1 7
values of physical education intensify. In 1920 the IHSAA noted that

"gambling is becoming more and more noticeable at our games and
tourneys.‘ In the same report the Board of Control noted disciplinary
action taken against a school whose fans had given money to
players.29 While addressing the growing popularity of basketball in
1921, retiring IHSAA President Merle J. Abbett warned:

When it gets to the point that one activity takes the stage
entirely in a school or community, it is certainly time to be
reminded that scholarship is primary and these other things
secondary. Our athletic program should strengthen and support
our educational growth, never weaken or substitute for it.30

But as the popularity of high school basketball reached
staggering proportions in the 20s, the IHSAA increasingly became an
enthusiastic voice in support of the community fanaticism
surrounding the games. Though the Board of Control, under the
guidance of Permanent Secretary Trester, maintained a pretense of
educational purpose in promoting the state tournament, they
increasingly became the allies of civic boosters and their efforts to
pepularize the games. In 1922 IHSAA President K.V. Ammerman

defended the mania surrounding high school basketball in this way:

The spirit manifested in our athletic contests has extended
beyond the threshold of our gymnasium and justifies the
continuance of such activities. This influence in communities
has prompted positive reaction, favorable and progressive.
Community houses have been built and the interests of
communities have been directed into one channel, that of a
keener enthusiasm concerning the future educational welfare
of our children.31

In 1924 IHSAA President H.B. Allman echoed this sentiment:

118

Within a comparatively short time, it [basketball] has risen
from practical obscurity and eclipsed all other games in
popular interest. For a period of five months each year the
school communities of the State are absorbed in the
performance of their basketball teams. This popular interest
is not to be regretted. In fact it should be fostered and
encouraged so long as it remains wholesome and is based upon
ideals of true sportsmanship...32

Under Trester's guidance, the lHSAA's Board of Control became
less concerned with the possible competing interests of community
boosterism and the educational value of high school basketball. If
the IHSAA could eliminate the taint of commercialism by cracking
down on its negative effects, such as gambling, out-of-control fans,
professionalism, and community proselytizing of out-of-town
players, Trester and the Board of Control believed high school
basketball provided the best of both worlds: a means to teach both
players and spectators lessons in self-control, courage, loyalty,
unselfishness, and cooperation, while also acting as a catalyst for
community cohesiveness and spirit.

In this context, Trester and the IHSAA tried to more
effectively regulate the play of high school basketball in the 19203.
In order for the civic boosters to properly market the local high
school basketball team as a symbol of community spirit, the team
had to be connected with the local high school, an institution
believed to transcend political, social, and cultural divisions. If the
teams competing in the state tourney were to remain under the
auspices of the public school system and be comprised of students,
the IHSAA had to guarantee their amateur status.

Trester seemed to send a loud message to cities and towns

around the state by punishing those schools that paid their players

1 19
directly or indirectly, gave bonuses to coaches for winning games, or

used players who had exhausted their four years of eligibility.
Before Trester took these measures of control, reports of teams
looking for an unfair advantage regularly appeared in the local
papers of Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle. Anderson, for example,
accused visiting players of everything from taking stimulants for
more energy to greasing their bodies to make them more difficult to
guard.33 The most common allegation was that schools allowed and
even encouraged the participation of ineligible players. During the
early years of IHSAA-sanctioned basketball, the Board of Control had
to regularly mete out punishment to schools that violated the
association's four-year eligibility or amateur status rule. A week
before the third state tournament in 1913, New Castle's star center
“was disqualified upon the assertion that he was a five-year man.“
The New Castle Daily Courier reported that the Board of Control of
the IHSAA met immediately before the start of the tourney that year
to determine the eligibility of 'a number of association teams" for
this same offense. So prevalent was this problem that the paper
speculated ”if this [the infraction of the four-year rule] is verified
it will either mean the amending of one of the association's rules or
the barring of several members from the tournament at Bloomington
next week."34

The IHSAA's disqualification of teams that competed with
ineligible players during these early years of the state tournament
appeared to have a chilling effect on the practice. In 1918 New
Castle school officials voluntarily disallowed another star center

from playing in the sectional championship game against Muncie

120
because of complaints filed by nearby Mt. Summit residents that

alleged Joe Rhoten had played on an independent basketball team for
money. Though the New Castle Daily Courier claimed the complaint
resulted from a ”personal grudge” and that Rhoten denied receiving
any money, school officials thought it not worth risking the
potential disqualification of the entire team.35 By the 19208
reports of these sort of rule infractions became less common in the
press. By choosing to take a public stand in a few cases, Trester and
his Board of Control had successfully protected the integrity of high
school basketball, at least in the public's eye, thereby making it safe
for civic boosters to promote the teams as symbols of community
pride.

Despite the apparent success of Trester's efforts to clean up
high school basketball, some educators grew increasingly wary of
the commercial influence on school sport. Echoing the concerns of
the Carnegie Report on Athletics in American Colleges and Schools, 3
1930 editorial in The Indiana Teacher claimed that the ill effects of
commercialism on high school basketball could only be avoided if
"the responsibility for the control of athletics... rest with the
faculty and institutional head, and not with the fans, athletic
associations, alumni clubs or paid coaches." To these critics, the
negative effects of boosterism still existed in schools throughout

the state. The article suggested that:

Cases of professionalism, false grading, importation of
players, toleration of gross immorality on the part of athletes,
falsifying of school records and reports by the school
administration, fan control of athletics, and even of the school

121

board and administration, are to be found in Indiana public
schools with apparently increasing frequency...

The editorial concluded that ”we must look for protection to the
Indiana High School Athletic Association.'36 But by 1930 the IHSAA
had already been thoroughly wed to the very boosters the article
warned against.

The commodification of the local high school basketball team
served more than just the symbolic purpose of generating civic pride
for all to see. It also had a more direct impact on the economy of
communities like Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle that had
parlayed the success of their high school basketball teams into new
gyms. The IHSAA rewarded communities that had demonstrated this
sort of enthusiastic support for high school basketball with the
right to host a sectional or even regional tournament. This meant an
influx of visitors spending money in city stores, restaurants, and
hotels.

All three cities had competed hard and early for the right to
host a tournament. Muncie's anger over having to play the 1915
sectional tournament on Anderson's home court exemplifies this
rivalry:

The selection of Anderson as a place for playing the
state division tournament has not been received in this city
[Muncie] with any great degree of joy among members of the
local high school team and their supporters.

ln playing on the home floor, Anderson, whose only near

rival is Muncie, has a distinct advantage, familiarity with a
floor and goals and the support of a crowd of home rooters....37

122
Two years later the New Castle Daily Courier could not contain its

glee when New Castle was also chosen as a sectional site over

Muncie:

Arrangements are being completed for the sectional
basketball tournament to be held in this city at the Coliseum
on Friday and Saturday, March 2 and 3, in which basketball
teams of Henry and Delaware county will participate...

Newcastle has been fortunate in being one of the twenty
places in the state selected for a tourney, being chosen in this
particular district over Muncie, which was h0ping to be chosen
this year. Muncie has not yet had a district tournament at
home and hoped to secure one this spring.

The local accommodations, however, and the
accessibility of Newcastle to all other towns by
transportation lines, caused this city to be selected over the
Delaware county seat.38

After these disappointments, it is not surprising to read newspaper
accounts of Muncie's excitement over the prospects that they would
host not just a sectional tournament, but also a regional tournament
in 1925:

Now we shall turn our faces hopefully toward the future and to
the building up of next year's team. It is more than likely, too,
that the 1925 regional tournament will be played in Muncie for
by that time there will be ready for use here, if plans do not
miscarry, two great auditoriums either one capacious enough
for the state tournament. So let this be our program: The
regional tourney in Muncie and the Bearcats the state
champions in 1925!”

Of course, plans did miscarry and Muncie Central did not get its new
high school gymnasium until 1928. At any rate, Muncie did host the
1925 regional tournament at the Ball State Teachers College
Gymnasium, a year that saw 674 teams participate in the state
tournament with 64 sectionals feeding into 8 regional

tournaments.4°

123
The honor of hosting a tournament did in fact serve the

symbolic purpose of celebrating a community's civic pride and
economic promise, but it also acted to give a more direct and
tangible economic boost to a city. Hundreds and eventually
thousands of pe0ple from other towns in the district flocked to the
host city for a weekend of tournament games. This not only offered
civic boosters an opportunity to showcase the vitality of the city,
but also offered businesses the chance to make money off the
visitors. Cities like Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle that were
fortunate enough to host a tournament rolled out the red carpet for
their guests. Amidst the prediction that more out-of-town rooters
would invade Anderson for the 1923 sectional tournament than the
high school gym could accommodate, The Anderson Herald reported
the special arrangements the city made to greet newly arriving

teams:

Some of the out-of-town fans arrived here last evening
but most of the visitors are not due here until this morning.
Several of the visiting teams will be accompanied by special
carloads of rooters. The Pendleton, Elwood and Lapel
delegations will reach Anderson about noon and the Kempton
team and its fans will be met at the trains by two sponsors,
one a business man and the other a high school student. These
sponsors will provide automobile transportation and make
other arrangements for the team members and coach while
they are in Anderson.41

With the influx of visitors and the attention of locals focused
on the tournament, businesses in the host city exploited this
excitement to market their products. Merchants in Muncie on the
weekends of these tournaments, for example, filled pages of the

city's most popular paper, the Muncie Morning Star, with

124
advertisements. From Kiser jewelry to Petro's Cafe, Muncie

businesses tried to capitalize on the public support of high school
basketball by drawing connections between their products and the
games. One furniture store in its advertisement, for example, stated
that "forty thousand Muncie people are relying on the Bearcats to
take the regional, (and) thousands of Muncie and eastern Indiana
people rely on Banner Furniture Store to supply their... house
furnishing needs."42 These advertisements exemplified the most
blatant commodification of high school basketball and the athletes.
Tournament time offered local merchants an opportunity to
prosper from the mania surrounding high school basketball. For
example, before the 1926 regional tournament at the Ball State
Teachers College Gymnasium in Muncie in which Anderson, Muncie
Central, and New Castle high schools all competed, the entire city
eagerly anticipated the action. The Muncie Morning Star announced
the Friday before the tournament started that although the gym
could accommodate nearly 4,000 spectators, all tickets to the seven
tournament games had quickly sold out. According to Roy C. Keever,
tourney manager from Selma High School, “those who were not
fortunate enough to obtain one [a ticket] are out of luck." The paper
reported that, despite its illegality, tickets were allegedly being
'scalped' for ”ridiculously high prices." "Realizing that several
thousand fans in this vicinity [would] be anxious to get the returns
of the games as speedily as possible," the Muncie Morning Star
arranged to give out radio play-by-play reports from radio station
WHBU in Anderson in cooperation with the Anderson Bulletin. For

those still without radios and therefore unable to take advantage of

125
this broadcast, the paper also agreed to report the progress of all

games from outside their building by way of a special telephone hook
up from the gymnasium to the paper's office.43

No wonder area businesses tried to cash in on this enthusiasm.
Advertisements became an important way to sell products in the
19203 and 308. With the ever-expanding mass media at their
disposal, advertisers implicitly and explicitly reinforced the values
of industrial capitalism and the nascent consumer culture.
Recognizing their stake in contemporary social and economic
institutions, businessmen did little to portray realities in these
advertisements that challenged the system that supported them. As
Roland Marchand has noted, they became masters of dramatizing the
American dream.44 Though less sephisticated than advertisments in
the national press or larger cities at the time, local businesses in
these towns certainly understood how a successful high school
basketball team represented the American Dream to their
community. The team represented how people could achieve success
in the new economic order.

Throngs of fans eagerly awaiting the commencement of the
1926 regional tournament opened their Saturday edition of the
Muncie Morning Star to pages of advertisements from businesses
that wrapped their product in the mania over high school basketball
generally and the Muncie Central Bearcats specifically. Typically
using photographs of players from the Bearcat team, dozens of
advertisements shamelessly used these amateur athletes to sell

their products. A couple of examples will suffice:

126

Do it now Bearcats - put an end to Greenfield and then
Newcastle and then a certain few teams that are going to the
state... Put an end to tooth trouble - have those old snags and
roots extracted and replaced with true-to-nature, life-like
teeth...

Bearcats - we are sure optimistic about your basket shooting -
it takes a keen eye.... So 'guard" those eyes like you do the ball
and play safe, for it's the mistakes you are sorry for

afterward. Then “pass“ your eye troubles along to Meigs when
you feel yourself slipping and you'll bring home the bacon in
any line. But we are sure optimistic that you'll win - so let's
go Bearcatsl Meigs Eyesight Specialists45

Like the President of Muncie's Chamber of Commerce said in
1928, "thousands of dollars could not purchase the advertising these
boys have given Muncie."46 More to the point, thousands of dollars
could not have purchased the advertising the boys had given the
merchants of Muncie. By visually connecting their product to the
players on the team, local businesses tapped into the deeper cultural
meanings of high school basketball in these communities. Motivated
to understand their audience in their efforts to sell services and
merchandise, local businesses recognized the high school basketball
team represented both hope and reassurance to people anxious about
their future. Each victory on the way to a championship provided
evidence in support of the American Dream that taught success came
with a little hard work. If a business visually tied its image to a
symbol of this dream, in the same way Nike, McDonalds, and other
mega-corporations do with Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and other
professional athletes at the end of the twentieth century, consumers
presumably associated feelings of hope and success with the goods

or services advertised. In this context, the values that made an

127
athlete or team successful were sometimes explicitly associated

with the product in the advertisement: “It's a high quality team
trained Rita and Coached Rite. There's a lot of satisfaction in having
such a team represent Muncie. There's a lot of satisfaction in eating
Bake Rite product.“7

Capitalists interested in furthering a consumer culture that
reinforced the dominant economic and social order worked with the
IHSAA to make high school basketball a cultural phenomenon in
Indiana during the 19208. In effect, the locus of control of
basketball games had changed from the Christian middle-class
social reformers of the late nineteenth century to the Progressive
Era public educators of the early twentieth century and ultimately
to the civic and business leaders of the 19203. But as control of the
game changed hands, traces of each group's influence remained. As
people in small and medium-sized communities throughout Indiana
flocked to the new “temples” of high school basketball, they had to
contend with the values of all three groups responsible for the
production of the games.

At the same time, the masses participated in the consumption
of the games for reasons distinct from those the producers intended.
High school basketball in Indiana did not become popular just
because social reformers, educators, IHSAA, or Chamber of
Commerce willed it to be so. That which is popular, in this case
high school basketball, becomes so only if the masses can also
discover, create, and express their own meanings through their

participation or consumption. The popularity of Indiana high school

128
basketball contained expressions not only of the powerful, but also

of the disempowered. At one level the masses could make
connections with some of the different meanings expressed by the
various producers; at another level they took possession of the
games and created their own meanings. As the next two chapters
will reveal, some of these meanings embraced those values advanced
by the producers while others conflicted with them. In some ways
those from the working class attending these high school games in
cities like Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle took the social and
economic conservatism of the reformers, educators, and
businessmen to the extreme by defining their sense of community in
exclusive terms. In doing so, they became absorbed into the
hegemony of industrial-capitalism. But in other ways they
expressed their resistance to the imposed social order of the
reformers, educators, and businessmen by creating an atmosphere at
the games not unlike Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque.48 Like a
carnival, high school basketball games offered a space where the
subordinated celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing
truth of the established order. Any study of the cultural production
of high school basketball in Indiana must include the often times
conflicted meanings the masses created by supporting the local

team.

129

Chapter Four Notes

1Robert S. and Helen Merrel Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern
American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1929), 402.

2The Muncie Evening Press, March 15, 1923, 8.
3The Muncie Evening Press, March 17, 1923, 1.
4The Muncie Evening Press, March 19, 1923, 4.

5Howard J. Savage, American College Athletics, Bulletin Number 23
(New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,
1929), 60.

5|bid.

7Donald E. Hamilton, Hoosier Temples: A Pictorial History of
Indiana's High School Basketball Gyms (St. Louis: G. Bradley
Publishing, Inc., 1993) 32.

8Hamilton nostalgically refers to these large high school
gymnasiums in Indiana as temples.

9The Rosennial, 1919, 84.
10Trester, 168.

11T he Indiana Teacher 72 (November, 1927), 22. Lynds, Middletown
In Transition, 291. David G. Martin, "Gymnasium or Coliseum?
Basketball, Education and the Community Impulse in Indiana in the
Early Twentieth Century,“ in Hoosier Schools: Past and Present,
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). Martin makes the
case that while high school coaches in the 1920s had equal or even
better credentials than their non-coaching peers, their salaries
were near the top of public school teachers.

12The Rosennial, 1927, 70.
13The X-Ray, 1918, 62.

1“The Anderson Herald, February 28, 1923, 6.

130

15From the computer data base at the Indiana High School Basketball
Hall of Fame in New Castle, Indiana.

1fiThe Muncie Evening Press, February 9. 1924. 4-

17See Robert Lipsyte and Peter Levine, idols of the Game: A Sporting
History of the American Century (Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, Inc.
1995), 78-116.

1 8Savage, 52-76.
1 9|bid., 60.

201' raster, “Athletics and Physical Education in Junior and Senior
High Schools,‘ 58-59.

21Savage, 60.

22Trester and the IHSAA were instrumental in the construction of
the Butler University Fieldhouse in 1928 in Indianapolis (now known
as Hinkle Fieldhouse). The IHSAA encouraged the construction of the
$800,000, 15,000 seat fieldhouse by signing a long-term lease with
Butler for the use of the building as the state tournament venue. In
1933 the IHSAA also agreed to help the university pay to have the
floor reconfigured so more bleachers could be added to the facility.
Butler Fieldhouse hosted the state championship tourney from 1928
until 1971 and still hosts sectional, regional, and semi-state
tournament games. At the time of its construction, the fieldhouse
was the largest basketball gymnasium in America. Tony Hinkle,
Butler's basketball coach at the time, said, “teams would come
through from the west, headed for Madison Square Garden, but they
wanted to stop here, just to play in this building." Phillip M. Hoose,
Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana (Indianapolis, IN:
Guild Press of Indiana, Inc., 1995, 2nd edition) 103.

23Martin, 18.
24IHSAA Handbook, 1925, 16.

25Phillip M. Hoose, Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana
(Indianapolis, IN; Guild Press of Indiana. lnc.. 2nd edition), 103.

131

26IHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1912, 7.
27lbid., 3-4.

23IHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1918, 7.
29lHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1920, 9, 61.
30lHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1921, 9.
31lHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1922, 9.
32IHSAA Handbook and Report of the Board of Control, 1922, 10.

33The Anderson Herald, January 9, 1915, 6. Under the headline
”Stimulants Fail to Daunt Locals" an article accused players from
Bloomington High School of ”taking their turn at the bottle, which
was said to contain 'spirits of ammonia.‘ " The Muncie Morning Star,
March 12, 1916, 10, reported that the Cicero High School team
defeated Anderson High School in a sectional tournament game in
part due to the Cicero players covering their bodies with grease.
The paper reported that ”Anderson protested and the referee
compelled the Cicero boys to remove the grease.” The Anderson
Herald, March 12, 1916, 10, also reported the Cicero story and said
that Trester made an appearance at half-time and ordered the Cicero
players to “take a warm shower“ to remove the grease. Cicero won
the game 18 to 12 and the Herald ran a headline over the Anderson
team picture that read ”Not District Champions, But Clean Through
and Through."

34New Castle Daily Courier, March 8, 1913, 8.

35New Castle Daily Courier, March 11, 1918, 8.

36"High School Athletics” The Indiana Teacher 74 (April 1930): 17.
37The Anderson Herald, February 9, 1915, 6.

38New Castle Daily Courier, February 7, 1917, 8.

39The Muncie Evening Press, March 10, 1924, 2.

132

4°lHSAA Handbook and Report of Board of Control, 1925, 15.

“The Anderson Herald, March 2, 1923, 8.

42Muncie Morning Star, March 13, 1926, 6.

“Muncie Morning Star, March 12, 1926,10.

“Roland Marchand, Advertising The American Dream: Making Way For
Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985), xviii.

45Muncie Morning Star, March 13, 67.

46Hamilton, 32.

4 7Muncie Morning Star, March 13, 7.

“Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 1984).

CHAPTER FIVE

Small Town Values and Big City Dreams

The streets were peopled with their fame,
All devotions sanctioned their name,
Through every vein their hopes ran--
The smallest urchin, the mightiest man.
Then silent luck, ill, sulking, low and grey,
Claimed kindred, and wafted Victory away.
The very air their names seemed sighing,
They fall devoted, but undying-
Despite defeat and the regret she bears,
Our hearts are glorious still, and theirs.
It's ever a watchword to the earth,
When men would do deeds of worth-
Where victory is lost, or victory won,
Our hearts are blended into one.
-An Ardent Rooter1

Just as Christian social reformers and public school educators

spread the gospel of basketball around the turn of the century in

response to the potentially negative effects of modernism, peeple in

communities like Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle in part

supported the local high school basketball team in an effort to

recapture a sense of place akin to the small rural village of the

nineteenth century. Like the "ardent rooter' from Muncie that sent

the above poem into the Muncie Evening Press after a disappointing

Bearcat loss to Shelbyville High School in the 1924 regional

tournament, fans looked to high school basketball to create a feeling

133

134
of community believed lost after the dramatic social and economic

transformation of the past few decades.

Though not simply passive recipients of the ideology social
reformers, educators, and boosters tried to advance in the
production of basketball, the fans shared their belief that a
successful high school basketball team embodied the American
Dream. This feeling of hope the team engendered had the effect of
alleviating the anxiety many felt because of the recent social and
economic changes. The physical strength, determination, toughness,
courage, discipline, hard work, and self-sacrifice on display each
week in the high school gymnasium suggested traditional values had
survived the regimentation, hierarchy, fragmentation, alienation,
and salaried dependence associated with the new social and
economic order.

As a representation of virtues associated with the state's
rural tradition, people from both the working and business classes
rallied around the local team. As one reporter for the Muncie
Evening Press explained before the 1923 sectional tourney, "the
Central High team is regarded as a civic asset and it is the city's
pride. The hopes of the community go forth today with the team."2
The groundswell of public support for high school basketball in
Indiana was the result of a nostalgic longing for a simpler time and
a boundless hope for a brighter future. People wanted a community
that looked and acted like a nineteenth century small rural village
without giving up the promise of prosperity offered by recent
industrial growth. The high school basketball team became a symbol

for both small town values and big city dreams.

135
As a symbol of the past, the local high school basketball team

became a sacrosanct white institution. Support for the team
engendered a feeling of belonging because many of the values the
team embodied were associated with the community's shared ethnic
culture. In this way the young men playing basketball on Friday and
Saturday nights during the winter months became paragons of a
white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.

During the first thirty years of Indiana high school basketball,
the make-up of the teams competing in the IHSAA tournament
mirrored the state's white, native-born, and Protestant population.
Obviously, because most Indiana towns and cities had over 90
percent white, native-born, and Protestant populations, chances
were great that the young men playing on the high school team would
also be white, native-born, and Protestant. Furthermore, most young
men in these and other towns and cities throughout the state learned
the game during the first three decades of the twentieth century by
playing in the YMCA, an exclusively Protestant organization that
excluded African Americans, Catholics, and Jews.3 Almost all of the
players on the Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle high school teams
of the 19103 and 20s, for example, had previously played in the
YMCA's junior league for fourteen to sixteen-year olds. The local
YMCA junior league team even occasionally received coverage in high
school yearbooks because it "furnished excellent material for the
high school.” New Castle High School went so far as to allow the
secretary of the local YMCA, Thad Gordon, have an organized junior

league team practice during the first period of school.4

136
Racial exclusion policies, consistent with the racism of the

times, also contributed to the homogeneity of the teams competing
for the IHSAA championship. As a result of the Supreme Court's
endorsement of “separate but equal” public institutions in Plessy v
Ferguson (1896), Klan-influenced school boards of the 1920s in
cities that had relatively significant black populations, namely
Indianapolis, Evansville, and Gary, opened segregated all-black high
schools that IHSAA Permanent Secretary Trester determined
ineligible to play in the state tournament. Crispus Attucks High
School of Indianapolis opened in 1927 as that city's all-black school,
while the all-black schools of Gary Roosevelt High School and
Evansville Lincoln opened their doors in 1928. In 1927 Trester
concluded that although a creation of a public school board, Crispus
Attucks or any other all-black school could not play IHSAA-
sanctioned sporting events because they were not open to all
students.5 Incidentally, this order also applied to the growing
number of parochial schools in the state, eliminating a large number
of Catholics from competition.

Trester's order only acted to reduce even further an already
small number of African Americans and Catholics competing in
IHSAA high school basketball games. Ironically, the segregated
schools In Gary and Indianapolis forced to play outside of the IHSAA
meant that those African Americans competing on IHSAA-sanctioned
teams from 1927 to 1941 came most often from towns and cities
with relatively small black populations. In communities like
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle, the black population was too

small for the local school board to justify segregated schools;

137
therefore blacks went to the same schools as whites. Even still, the

number of black players playing in the IHSAA tournament from 1911
to 1941 was incredibly small. During the 19203 no African
Americans played on any of the Anderson, Muncie, or New Castle high
school basketball teams.6

Anderson High School in 1927 even went a step further to
insure that its varsity basketball team remained white by creating
an ”Advisory Basketball League” for Native American students. In
effect this amounted to an intramural league composed of teams
representing the two tribes from the area, the Mohawks and the
Iroquois. The Advisory League acted to segregate Native Americans
from playing on the varsity team, the Anderson High School Indians,
actually named in honor of the historical presence of Native
Americans in the area.7

Because of Indiana's homogeneity, the YMCA's influence, and
various efforts at racial, ethnic, and religious segregation, IHSAA
basketball remained a game played almost exclusively by white,
native-born, and Protestant young men until World War II. However,
it is difficult to prove that those supporting the team exclusively
attached the values exhibited by the players to a white, native-born,
and Protestant culture. Besides an occasional reference to a
particular player as a "young white hope," people rarely referred to
the team's ethnicity because they did not have to, they were all
white Protestants.8 Consider the several chapel services held
before big games to allow fans the opportunity to pray for a victory.

By encouraging all to attend these services conducted by a local

138
minister, the Protestantism of both the fans and players was simply

assumed.9

On the rare occasion a player of a different race did play in a
game, however, people and the press distinguished his style of play
from the others. When Connersville High School visited New Castle
with an African-American guard on the team, for example, the crowd
displayed “very bad sportmanship" by “hissing the brilliant play of
the colored man.“ Though a New Castle Daily Courier article chided
the fans for deriding the “colored man,“ it attributed his “brilliant
playing“ to excessive physical contact and “little tricks... not
allowed under the rules.“ In the paper's back-handed compliment it
kept the Image of a black basketball player detached from the values
of the white-Protestant culture. In a way, the Connersville player
assumed the role of trickster trying to subvert the social order
basketball represented. Through sheer rugged play and cunning, he
violated the rules and thwarted the efforts of the rule-abiding New
Castle team.10 I

Characterizations such as this grew out of a cultural milieu
that instinctively treated African Americans as inferior to whites.
Whites living in early twentieth-century Indiana, especially those
from the South, were raised to view African Americans “as an
American leper."ll Only fifty years removed from slavery, most
whites living in the communities of Anderson, Muncie, and New
Castle came from an American tradition that embraced a form of
racism that reconciled Christian compassion, humanitariansim, and
an ideology of liberty and equality with a passion for dominance and

avarice. In order to do this, white America over hundreds of years

139
developed a hierarchy that placed African Americans lower on the

evolutionary scale by imagining them as more savage and less
civilized than whites. Conseqently, whites felt justified in their
paternalistic and often times cruel treatment of African
Americans.12 Consistent with this belief, the New Castle Courier
article portrayed the African-American player from Connersville as

overly aggressive or savage-like:

When trying to get away from the man guarding him he simply
uses his knees against the stomach of his adversary and knocks
the wind out of him. Another little trick was that when he
threw the ball for the basket he invariably back-hits his
guarder with his elbow.13

While African Americans were portrayed as physcially
aggressive, other ethnic groups were portrayed as lacking the
physical attributes needed to be good basketball players. The 1919
Anderson High School annual, for example, nicknamed the team's
center, Arthur Dykins, “Jew“ because of his “Jewish“ looks. But in
the short description of Dykins the annual stated “in spite of his
looks he is some jumper at center, getting the tip off from every
center that he has played against this season....“14 The implication
was that Jews did not possess the physical strength to jump the
way Dykins did.

If African Americans were considered inferior because of their
animal-like strength, Jews were believed inferior because they
rejected physical activity completely. Jews during the great influx
of European immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century and
beginning of the twentieth century became labeled as physically

incompetent. Drawing upon an historical tradition of Jewish life in

140
nineteenth-century Eastern Europe shtetls, anti-Semites, such as

Henry Ford, evoked images of orthodox Jewish men devoting their
life to the study of the Talmud and valuing the intellect over the
physical. While Peter Levine has recently shown how many of the
newly arriving Jewish immigrants and their children embraced
America's love of sport, at a time when physical fitness, strength,
and ruggedness were considered important qualities for true
Americans, the stereotype of Jews shying away from physical
activity had a marginalizing effect. As the reference to Dykins as
“Jewish looking“ in this context and the growing influence of the Ku
Klux Klan (KKK) during this time suggests, many in these Indiana
communities embraced the belief that Jews did not possess the
right stuff to be good high school basketball players nor, by
extension, good Americans.”

The emergence of the KKK and Women of the Ku Klux Klan
(WKKK) in the 19203, like the growing popularity of high school
basketball, signified an impulse in the relatively homogeneous
population of Indiana to recapture a pro-industrial sense of
community that implicitly excluded all except white, Anglo-Saxon
Protestants. The KKK and WKKK offered nascent industrial cities
like Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle a way to react against the
dramatic economic and social changes of the past three decades. As
a larger segment of the population felt increasingly alienated from
the forces that controlled their lives, the Klan promised a way to
assert popular control over community affairs.

Historians have pointed to several factors contributing to the

reemergence of the KKK, an organization once popular during

141
Reconstruction among defeated sons of the Confederacy, during the

years surrounding World War I. Chief among these factors were
rapid technological and social changes, declining agricultural prices,
high rates of immigration and internal migration, post-World War I
nationalism, rapid urbanization, and the migration of large numbers
of Southern blacks to Northern cities.16 The argument goes that
these social changes at the beginning of the twentieth century
brought to the surface the racism and nativism that had always
existed among Northern rural and urban white Protestants. Certainly
the popularity of the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith's film, The Birth
of a Nation, that glorified the original Klan, the furor surrounding
the trial of the Jewish businessman Leo Frank for assaulting a young
female employee, and the federal legislative restrictions on
immigration in the 19205 also symbolize the reactionary politics of
this era. Historian Kathleen Blee argues that all it took to get
approximately four million men and women nationwide to join the
KKK's racist and nativist crusade between 1915 and 1925 was for
political and financial opportunists to tap into the fears that
native-born white Protestants shared as a result of these rapid
social and cultural changes.17

Between 1922 and 1925 Indiana produced the KKK's largest
state-wide membership in the nation, its greatest political
victories, and its most charismatic and powerful leaders. Estimates
from membership records reveal that between one-quarter and one-
third of all native-born white men in the state paid their ten dollar
initiation fee to join the Klan during the 1920s. Membership

probably peaked around 1923 with approximately 250,000 to

142
300,000 card-carrying Klansmen in Indiana. Even after around a 30

to 40 percent decline in membership, a 1925 report revealed still
just under 166,000 state-wide members. These figures do not even
count the significant number of women and children that also
belonged to either the WKKK or Junior Klan. Consistent with the rest
of the state, the KKK enjoyed tremendous support in Anderson,
Muncie, and New Castle.18

Many of the social and cultural changes responsible for the
KKK's national revival did exist in Indiana during this time, such as
rapid Industrialization and urbanization, declining agricultual
prices, and post-World War I nationalism. But unlike other Northern
states, most of Indiana did not experience the high rate of European
immigration or African-American migration. Throughout these years
Indiana remained the most homogeneous state in the Union. For the
most part, the small to medium-sized cities of Indiana, such as
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle, were comprised of 90 to 95
percent native-born white Protestants. Of Anderson's almost
30,000 citizens in 1920, for example, only 912 were black and 940
foreign born. Of Muncie's almost 37,000 citizens, only 2,054 were
black and 820 foreign born. Meanwhile over 90 percent of New
Castle's almost 15,000 residents were native-born whites.
Furthermore, in all three of these communities there existed only an
extremely small Jewish population. And, as the Lynds noted, in
Muncie, Protestants out-numbered Catholics fifteen to one.19

Despite the almost total absence of the usual victims of the
KKK's hateful and aggressive reactionary politics, namely Catholics,

Jews, foreigners, and African Americans, the Klan in Indiana enjoyed

143
unprecedented popularity and power. Nowhere else did the Klan

garner enough support to actually gain political control at both the
local and state level. As the 1925 membership report of the Indiana
Klan reveals, those who joined this xenophobic organization
represented a cross section of Indiana's native-born, white, and
Protestant population. The KKK in Indiana was neither
predominantly rural nor urban, working nor business class,
fundamentalist nor liturgical. Like the local high school basketball
team, its support, to a significant degree, transcended divisions of
class and gender.20

Though relatively brief, the KKK's pepularity in Indiana was
dramatic. The hooded order seized control of the state Republican
party, and in 1924 New Castle native Edward Jackson, the hand
picked candidate of the state's Grand Dragon, D.C. Stephenson,
became governor. At the local level mayors, prosecutors, judges,
and police officers around the state belonged to the Klan. George
Dale, editor of the Muncie Post Democrat and notorious anti-Klan
activist, made a habit of revealing those local officials in Muncie
that belonged to the KKK. According to Dale, Muncie's police force
from 1923 to 1925 was “almost one hundred percent Klan.“ In
addition to Muncie's Chief of Police Van Benbow, Day Captain Ira
Coons, and Delaware County sheriff Harry Hoffman, Dale alleged that
Muncie's Mayor Quick briefly belonged to the order, though he later
renounced it as a “lawless and un-American organization,“ and
Republican city councilman Frank Barclay and seven other members

of the council were “banded together to do anything the Klan

144
wantled] done.“21 At its peak Delaware County had at least 6,800

Klansmen as well as one of the most active chapters of the WKKK.”

In these towns and cities that were comprised almost
exclusively of white, native-born Protestants, the KKK offered
membership to almost everyone in the community, unlike
organizations such as chambers of commerce and Rotary Club. The
available evidence shows that skilled and unskilled workers, clerks,
low-level white-collar workers, independent businessmen, civil
servants, and professionals joined the KKK in numbers fairly
proportionate to their numbers within the state's general white
Protestant population. The only variation was that low-level white-
collar and skilled blue-collar occupations joined in slightly greater
numbers, while unskilled laborers, probably due to the cost, joined
in slightly lower numbers.23 Only the very elite, those possessing
the real economic power within these communities, were absent
from the membership rosters of the local Klaverns.24

The Klan occupied a place at the center of these communities'
social life like no other religious, political, or civic organization
between the years of 1922 and 1925. It offered an avenue for the
white Protestant majority to come together across class divisions
and celebrate traditional values associated with the state's agrarian
past in reaction to the state's recent social and cultural
transformation. In light of the impersonalization, isolation,
economic and political concentration, and the declining social
influence of the church and family, the ground swell of support for

the KKK in Indiana “expressed continued faith in traditional

145
institutions and proclaimed the authority of the average person

within the community“?5

In addition, the racism, nativism, and religious intolerance
promoted by the Klan offered a scapegoat to blame for the
diminished authority of the average person. Ironically, the tactic to
exploit the fears many had of Catholics, foreign-born, African
Americans, and Jews worked so well in Indiana because of its
almost exclusively white, native-born, and Protestant populace. The
rhetoric and symbols of white supremacy used by the KKK offered an
identity that almost all could coalesce around in their effort to
regain popular control over community affairs. The large
membership in local Klaverns represented this impulse to redefine a
sense of community around a shared ethnic culture.

That thousands of Hoosiers identified their lost sense of
control with an already marginalized group of citizens demonstrated
the hegemony of industrial capitalism. Though the KKK offered an
alternative to the political, social, and economic organizations of
the elite, it never directly opposed them. The Klan's xenophobia only
acted to deflect any real challenge to the concentration of capital
that accompanied the industrialization of Indiana's towns and
villages and that caused working class alienation. In fact, the Klan's
politics in many cases merely acted to reinforce the social,
political, and economic power of capital. The Klan, like big
business, campaigned against the influence of unions, claiming they
were nothing more than a way for communists to seize control of
America's economy. Also, the KKK adamantly fought for a

militaristic enforcement of Prohibition, thereby supporting efforts

146
of social control by employers concerned with the effects alcohol

had on their workers. In short, the Klan offered a way to react
against the effects of industrial capitalism while not challenging
its basic principles.

As Roy Rosenzwieg has shown in his cultural history of
workers and leisure in Worcester, Massachusetts between 1870 and
1920, ethnic identification can ultimately interfere with the
development of a class consciousness among workers. But in
Worcester the problem involved various ethnic groups creating
distinct sub-cultures, consequently discouraging the creation of a
unified working-class culture in opposition to the dominant order.26
In Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle in the 19103 and 20s workers
concentrated more on their shared ethnicity, namely white, native-
born, and Protestant, rather than their shared economic
subordination. Though not containing the ethnic diversity of a
Worcester, the workers of these Indiana communities similarly
became so focused on ethnicity that issues of class became lost.
The impulse to reclaim a sense of community around a shared ethnic
culture was why Indiana became “the epicenter of the national Klan
movement“ at the same time large high school basketball
gymnasiums were popping up around the state.”

Indiana high school basketball's popularity emerged within this
cultural milieu that offered fertile ground for the Klan's revival.
Pe0ple were drawn to the support of their local team for many of the
same reasons they joined the KKK in such large numbers. The high
school basketball team offered a measure of reassurance at a time

of great uncertainty. High school basketball offered a way to create

147
a sense of community in the face of economic and social

fragmentation. Consider this Muncie Evening Press editorial during
the 1923-24 season:

The basketball season is at hand. For some unknown
reason -- perhaps it is the appeal to the primitive instinct of
fighting, maybe from the clan urge -- the people of Muncie
always agree upon the necessity of standing solidly behind the
Central high school team in its contests with other city high
school teams. We may disagree about everything else -- and
usually do about almost everything else -- but when it comes
to backing the high school five in basketball, we are a unit.

That indicates that basically there is nothing wrong with
us. If the merchant is willing to leave his store, the physician
to take abrupt departure of his patients, and the manufacturer
to forsake the gods of the iron wheels in order to “root“ for a
crowd of boys in their “teens“ who are striving to place more
basket-balls in a ring than the boys who oppose them from
some other community, that indicates a solidarity of interest
that is not to be lightly discounted.28

In high school basketball the values of the dominant economic
order were wedded with ethnic Identification, thereby making it
easier for the working class to join with reformers, educators, and
boosters in the celebration of the local team's physical strength,
thoughness, intense effort, teamwork, and competitiveness. While
many of these values harkened back to a bygone are on the rugged
frontier, they also just so happened to work well within the new
economic order of industrial capitalism. Newspaper articles,
yearbook clippings, and advertisements reveal how these values
pervaded the basketball-mad culture of Indiana.

AMuncie Evening Press article early during the 1920-21

season, for example, declared that strong physical condition was

148
“the most sought after attribute of a basket ball team.“ Each coach,

the article stated, aimed to place his team In “that state of physical
perfection that will keep a team fresh and fast right up to the final
whistle; that will keep it at the same speed in the last five minutes
as in the opening quarter.“29 During the course of that season the
paper went from blaming the team's failures on “a lack of observing
training rules“ to attributing their successes to the development of
stamina by following the exercise regiment of the team's trainer,
Ray Master.30

The press often pointed to physical strength developed through
disciplined training methods as the crucial difference between
winning and losing. A lack of strength meant a weakness of
character that ultimately would cause the team's demise, as

indicated by this 1924 Muncie Evening Press editorial:

...members of the Central five figure that so long as they win
their games, they may do as they like about training but there's
a time coming when they won't win their games. Just how the
Bearcats expect to play in a tournament when they haven't
stamina enough to last through forty minutes of one game is
more than we can figure. We've already heard the excuse that
Muncie was tired out from the Newcastle game the night
before. In any tournament there's games the night before and
there's games the same day and if a team isn't able to stand
the gaff, it is eliminated by a better outfit.

Save for one or two members the entire outfit is failing to
keep training. Late hours, almost any kind of diet, eating
anything they want before a game, however pleasant it may be
for the players themselves, has never been advised by any real
trainer.... When members of the team are false to the trust
which has been placed in them each violation of the training
ethics does just that much to counter balance his work.31

149
Similarly, the New Castle Daily Courier attributed a New Castle loss

to Connersville High School to the fact that “every member of the
team but one had spent the previous evening until the small wee
hours in jollification and were in no condition to play good
basketball.“32

A well-conditioned high school basketball team symbolized the
success of the YMCA, Playground Movement, and physical education
programs of the public school system that had tried to literally give
muscle to the next generation of leaders in reaction to the
weakening influence of an increasingly sedentary urban existence.
As Donald J. Mrozek has pointed out, by the end of the nineteenth
century, experts believed sports could replace the frontier
experience as a way for both spiritual and physical renewal. In
disciplines such as religion, medicine, nutrition, and physical
education, regenerative strategies focused on the moral power of
the body. The growing importance of scientific and medical research
as a means of gaining control over one's life influenced religious
leaders to have a more favorable attitude toward the material world.
Consequently, “the body claimed more attention as a vehicle for
right conduct in this world and, increasingly, as the model of life in
the next.“33 In this context, physical regeneration to many Christian
reformers became as important as salvation of the soul. The
strength displayed by high school basketball teams in Indiana
reassured people that the regenerative programs of reform-minded
institutions had well prepared the next generation to successfully

live in an Increasingly competitve world. Conversely, the lack of

150
physical fitness signaled a team not ready to compete, thereby

almost assuring defeat.34

High school yearbooks, written by students, provide direct
evidence of how the fans joined the social reformers and educators
in this celebration of physical strength. The Anderson High School
X-Ray during the 1910s and 20s, for example, routinely described
players as “the strongest and most fit.“ The student's preoccupation
with physical strength showed an embrace of values consistent with
industrial capitalism. The 1915 X-Ray explained that center Firman
Davis had “proved he was best suited for the position of center by
the relentless law of 'survival of the fittest,“ showing how this
celebration of strength incorporated the principles of Social
Darwinism.35 The 1914 X-Ray similarly described Arlo Byrum as one
who could “survive in a world among all types.“36 Social Darwinism
fit well within the economic order of industrial capitalism which
also taught that only the strongest few could survive the rigors of a
competitive marketplace. In this context, a January, 1913 article in
the Muncie Evening Press presented a pedagogical defense of
physical training in the public schools that stated “in these days of
the survival of the fittest it is important that the bodies of the
future citizens of the nation shall be as well trained as their
minds.“37

These press and high school yearbook clippings reveal the
public's acceptance of a pedagogy in vogue at this time that believed
in preparing young people, especially boys, for a competitive market
economy. The 1917 President of the IHSAA Board of Control, W.A.
Denny, preached this philosophy that believed in the important role

151
team sports like basketball played in developing strong bodies ready

to compete:

The instinct for play in both men and animals suggests natures
means for bringing about certain changes necessary for proper
muscular development and maintenance of bodily vigor. To be a
good animal is natures prerequisite to future growth, success,
or contentment... The sustained effort in competition, the
determined struggle for mastery, and the persistent attempt
to succeed are excellent qualities for scholastic attainment.38

Advertisements featuring players also provide evidence of how
peeple connected the value of physical strength to high school
basketball. Keep in mind that advertisements, whether successful
or not, typically tried to connect a product with a community's
zeitgeist. As Roland Marchand suggests, “among elite
communicators, advertisers have been motivated by a particularly
direct and intense need to understand and communicate effectively
with their audiences.“39 They have a vested interest in trying to
understand how the audience will respond to an advertisement's
message.

Though the reader did not automatically embrace the intended
message, because of the merchant's goal to effectively communicate
with the consumer, there is a good chance the values an
advertisement associated with a high school basketball player or
team reflected to some degree the audience's beliefs. Muncie's two
daily papers, the Muncie Morning Star and Muncie Evening Press, at
tournament time each year ran several pages of these
advertisements that used Bearcat players to promote products. One

such advertisement for Bake-Rite Products stated, “its a quality

152
team trained rite and coached rite. There's a lot of satisfaction in

having such a team represent Muncie.“4° Another advertisement for
a local bank insisted that, “basketball is similar to banking: It takes
training and saving...“41 Others actually claimed their product
helped the team gain the physical strength needed to win: “The
Bearcats Ate Meadow gold butter and won the regional. To win they
need the growth-promoting elements contained only in butter.“42
The development of physical strength alone, however, was not
enough to give these communities hope for the future. The call from
IHSAA's W.A. Denny for a “sustained effort in competition“ also
became an important value the people of these communities looked
for in their team. Often described by the local press,
advertisements, and high school yearbooks as a “fightin' spirit,“ the
spectators' admiration of a player's determination was an
ideological amalgamation of the Protestant work ethic of an
agrarian past and the Social Darwinism of an industrial present.
Indicative of this praise for tireless effort was this fan's poem in
the Muncie Evening Press before the 1924 regional tournament at

Richmond:

It isn't the score you have at the end,
But how you play and why.
It's whether your spirit will crack or bend,
Or whetheryou'll fight and try.43

The following season the Muncie Evening Press also praised the
team's effort after a particularly rough victory against a tough
Summitville team in which “charging, hacking and pushing were
much in evidence,“ but by game's end “it became merely a case of the

team with the most fight winning.“44

153
Nothing impressed the local press in these three communities

more than a player's display of strength and determination by
refusing to come out of a game despite an apparent injury. The New
Castle Daily Courier proudly reported that though a Centerville High
School player ran his knee into the stomach of a New Castle player
nicknamed “Ice“, “he soon revived and pluckily went back into the
game, refusing to allow any one to substitute for him.“45

Once again, the student-produced yearbooks provide further
evidence that the fans along with the social and economic elites of
their day shared this ideology that valued toughness, determination,
and courage. While recounting Muncie's loss to New Castle High
School in the 1922 sectional tournament championship game, 15-12,
the Muncie High School Magician explained that despite Arthur
Beckner's sprained ankle, Freddie Mace's cut cheek, and Harmon
Ulery's bandaged face, the team displayed “spirit and fight until the
last,“ making defeat a little easier to swallow.“6 The following year
the Magician said Theodore Bebout, guard on the 1922-23 Bearcats,
“was noted for his 'never-say-die' spirit and kept the boys right at
it.“ Likewise, forward Robert Poorman was “chuck full of fight and
certainly [did] not know the word 'quit',“ garnering “a host of
admirers for his clean playing and for his ever-present 'fightin'
spirit.“ That year the Muncie team lost in the state championship
game against Vincennes High School, 27-18, but during a close 33-
30 victory against Richmond High School in the quarter-final game
of the state tournament the Magician reported that the Bearcats
showed “the greatest fight put up by any basketball team in the

history of Hoosier basket-balldom.“47

154
The Anderson and New Castle high school yearbooks also used

the language of the local press by praising their players as
demonstrating “an inexhaustible fighting spirit that never
weakened.“ Several players on the 1913-14 Anderson team were
described as “exhibiting that 'never-give-up' spirit.”8 Though the
following year's team lacked size and lost in the sectional
tournament to a “strong Hartford City team,“ they “never lost heart,
always remaining true sports and fighting grimly until the end,
things which always characterize the men that Anderson sends....“49
The 1926 Anderson X-Ray described the coaching policy of Alan
Staggs as developing not a “basketball machine,“ but rather “real
fight“ and “manly traits“ in his players.

Juxtaposing the players' fight and manliness against the image
of a machine provides a glimpse at the complexity and sometimes
ambiguous nature of the cultural meanings expressed by those
supporting these teams. The high school yearbooks associated
manliness with the characteristics of strength, toughness, and a
fighting spirit. Other times the yearbooks praised the players'
teamwork or machine-like precision, but they usually linked the
team's masculinity with these traits more commonly associated
with the rugged individualism of the state's rural tradition. In this
context, dependence on a machine, a symbol of the industrial
economy, only served to weaken or emasculate the players. By
displaying toughness, strength, and a never-say-die attitude, these
teams showed that the young men raised in these communities could
retain their masculinity even in the face of the feminizing effects

of an urban-industrial social and economic order.

155
On the one hand a machine symbolized the emasculating forces

of industrialization, but it also represented the efficiency,
productivity. and hope inherent in these communities recent
economic growth. Besides physical strength and dogged
determination, the local press and high school yearbooks also
praised the players' teamwork. In doing so, the Anderson Herald,
Muncie Evening Press, Muncie Morning Star, and New Castle Daily
Courier borrowed the language of the industrial economy by
commonly describing the teams as “machines.“ In victory the local
press of these three communities typically characterized the teams
as “smooth-running machines.“ Or when a player performed
admirably they were often referred to as “important cogs in the
machine.“50 In a description of the New Castle team after an
impressive victory over Muncie, the New Castle Daily Courier wrote
that the team played with “machine-like precision“ as each player
passed the ball to others in an effort to secure the best shot each
trip down the roor.51 Later that year after a victory over Richmond
High School the paper once again praised New Castle's teamwork,
noting “that individual playing on a team does not count, but that
team work, in which every man tries his best to get the ball to
another player who has a better chance at the goal is the real
leader.“52 A 1921 story in the Muncie Evening Press commented that
“a successful basketball team must be composed of units who are
friendly to the progress of brother units and who do not take a
chance with a brother unit who has a better Opportunity to increase
the efficiency of the machine.“ This story particularly praised

Wendell Owens, guard on the Muncie team, who “usually sacrifices an

156
attempt at the basket when he can find a teammate in a better

position to shoot.“53

Conversely, if the team played poorly, the papers pointed to.
selfish play as the cause. During the 1924 season the Muncie
Evening Press attributed several poor outings by the Bearcats' to
such play: “Just why players should sacrifice the honor of the entire
quintet just for a few withered laurels which may come to
themselves, is a mystery.“ The story went on to note that on “too
many occasions individual players have refused to pass the ball to
teammates nearer the basket preferring to take long shots
themselves.“ Before the upcoming 1924 tournament this story
warned the Bearcats that “the schools which gain the recognition in
the coming sectional, regional and state classics will be the ones
which have basketball teams, not basketball players.“54

If there is any doubt that those supporting the local high
school team had been affected by and to a significant degree
accepted the ideology of industrial capitalism, consider once again
the student-produced high school yearbooks' description of the
various teams as “machine-like.“ The 1914 Anderson High School X-
Ray in its review of the basketball season stated “as each game
came on it [the team] grew better and improved until such a point of
efficiency was reached that it was developed into a regular machine,
each part dependent upon the other and each part working for the
whole....“55 In the 1918 X-Ray the “Review of the Season“ described
the team as “working together like clock work and with machine-
like precision.“56 The 1916 Muncie High School Magician similarly

attributed the success of its team to “going through steady machine-

1 5 7
like maneuvers for three nights a week.“57 Though not using

“machine“ in its description of the team, the 1922 New Castle High
School Rosennial also used language consistent with the corporate

morality of the day:

Every man played for the team and no discontent or “crabbing“
occurred during the entire season. When a substitute was sent
in, he did his best, the retiring player wishing him good luck
and encouraging him to play his best for the honor of the
school. This is probably one of the main reasons that the team
worked in perfect harmony throughout the basketball season.58

A successful basketball team represented the values of sacrifice,
cooperation, and obedience. In order to win, the members of the
team had to accept the idea that for the good of the whole, they
might not even get to play in the games. In other words, these teams
exemplified the sort of social cooperation applicable to a corporate
industrial society.59

The description of teams as “machines“ and players as “cogs“
signify how the values of industrial capitalism had become deeply
embedded in the culture of these communities. The machine, symbol
of the industrial revolution, became an important metaphor that
reveals the deeper cultural meanings of these games. Not simply
representative of a pastoral tradition, these young basketball
players symbolized the precision and efficiency of machine-based
production. In both the factory and on the basketball court, the
machine produced best. Similarly, the concept of team play
supported the corporate morality of this are instead of the rugged
individualism of the state's rural past. Just as the employee had to

sacrifice personal goals for the good of the company, players were

15 8
expected to set aside individual achievements for the good of the

team.

Once again, the cultural meanings of high school basketball
were complex. In their support of the local team, fans supported
values that presumably prepared young people for an industrial-
based economy while simultaneously embracing values that harkened
back to the nineteenth-century social order of the small rural
village or frontier. While images of teamwork and precision
signified readiness for the future, strength and toughness
represented a cultural construction of pro-industrial notions of
masculinity. Physical expression became inextricably linked to
notions of masculinity while women were encouraged to “contain
their bodies.“60 Many in these communities reacted to the increased
involvement of women in public life at the beginning of the
twentieth century by trying to reassert traditional, middle-class, or
even Victorian notions of gender. The creation of distinctive rules
for boys' and girls' basketball provides clear evidence of how these
communities constructed meanings of masculinity and femininity.

Public educators and social reformers supported the
establishment of separate rules for women's basketball around the
turn of the century. The first such rules for women's basketball
were established in 1899 by a National Women's Basketball
Committee under the auspices of the American Physical Education
Association. First published in 1901 by the Spalding sporting goods
company, these rules divided the court into three parts, front-,
center-, and backcourt regions, with six players designated as

forwards, centers, or guards correspondingly and confined to their

159
section of the court. Players were also restricted to only one

dribble (later modified to allow three dribbles) and prohibited to
make physical contact or hinder the shooter in any way. In contrast,
the boys' rules allowed the players to run the entire court and placed
fewer restrictions on dribbling and guarding the offensive player.61
As historian Susan Cahn has noted, the women's rules resulted from
social reformers' “concerted attack on the popular sport of
basketball, which seemed to them unfeminine and dangerous when
played before raucous mixed-sex crowds and under the influence of
male coaches or business interests.“62

lnterschool games between girls' teams were rare during the
first three decades of the twentieth century, as the National Section
on Women's Athletics (NSWA), the primary organization that
promoted the enforcement of separate rules for girls' basketball,
urged state high school Girls' Athletic Associations (GAA) around
the nation to limit girls' basketball to intramural competition. The
local GAA's that organized girls' basketball in Indiana adopted this
policy and made intramural play under NSWA rules the norm. In 1923
the IHSAA Board of Control became the governing body for girls'
athletics and immediatedly declared that “girls could not play
[basketball] by boys' rules under any condition.“63

Women social reformers around the turn of the century, such
as Smith College Athletic Director Senda Berenson Abbot,
discouraged interscholastic competition because of a belief that an
emphasis on competition would ultimately detract from the physical
education and health purposes of play.64 Unlike boys' basketball in

Indiana, the social reformers maintained a higher degree of control

160
over girls' basketball. Though in a few states such as Iowa and

Texas interscholastic girls' basketball not only survived but thrived
as people packed the gyms to watch the games, in Indiana the social
reformers won the day in their efforts to protect girls from public
salaciousness and display by postponing the initiation of an ISHAA
girls' state tournament until 1976.65

One educator, J. Anna Norris, warned against “the dangers of

basket ball“ for women by stating:

It is quite possible for it to foster a spirit of boisterousness
and mannishness, and this is especially likely to crop out if
match games with other institutions are played, or if
newspapers over-emphasize the event, or if games are played
before audiences that treat them as spectacles... The danger
of the development of the wrong attitude is one of the strong
reasons brought forward against permitting interscholastic
games.66

At another time she stated that because “woman is not essentially a
fighting animal,“ the “essential feature“ of girls' rules was to
“discourage personal contact.“67

Just like the cultural meanings of high school basketball that
served to marginalize African Americans and other ethnic groups,
these communities coalesced around a Victorian social construction
of gender roles that relegated women to a subordinated status. In
reaction to the dramatic social, cultural, and economic changes over
the last several years that included a larger number of women
entering the work force, many in these communities tried to
reassert the “cult of domesticity“ in efforts to redefine their newly

industrialized community.68

161
The economic implications in these efforts to create a

separate, non-competitive, private sphere for girls' basketball were
clear. The promoters of basketball in the public school system
believed the game offered lessons valuable to the future workers of
an industrial society. The values of obedience, cOOperation, self-
sacrifice, and discipline learned by playing basketball prepared
young men and women alike how to successfully get along in and
contribute to a corporate and industrial economic order. Educators
believed organized team sports like basketball offered a highly
rationalized form of competition that reflected the corporate
morality of industrial capitalism. But while both boys and girls
were to learn a corporate morality by participating in basketball,
only boys could actually participate in an openly competitive version
of the game. This distinction acted to reinforce women's
subordination in a society where open competition was the very
foundation of the economic order. Whereas boys were expected to
grow up and compete in the marketplace, girls should only
participate in the economy as factory employees, clerical workers,
or housewives. The lessons learned from open competition were
reserved for boys.

In contrast to the emphasis on physical strength and
competition, girls' athletics aimed to create good sports and team
players. Consider the one-page spread on girls' athletics in the 1919
New Castle High School yearbook. Besides a “class basketball
tournament,“ girls had the opportunity to participate in “after school
calisthenics, baseball, folk dancing, hikes, spreads and general good

times.“ Female students themselves wrote that it was “worth while

162
to belong to promote good sportsmanship“ and learn “that the basis

of all games is team-work; we have learned how to lose, besides.“
In conclusion they stated that “not the least dear to our hearts was
the athletic spread at the “Y“ on April 23. It is an impossibility to
do justice to the eats....“69 Not only did the activities completely
lack the sort of heated and physical competition inherent in the
boys' games, the year concluded with an affair that appealed to
women's domestic nature.

In his basketball trilogy about the mythical “fighting five“ of
Mayfield High School, Harold M. Sherman inadvertently offered a
fictional account of how the values of industrial capitalism
permeated Indiana boys' high school basketball. Author of several
books of fiction on sports in the 1920s and 30s for adolescent
readers, Sherman started his writing career as a reporter for the
Marion Chronicle from 1921 to 1924 where he observed firsthand the
mania surrounding Indiana high school basketball. Marion, home of
the 1926 state champions, is a town approximately thirty miles
north of the Anderson-Muncie-New Castle triangle.

In the first book, Mayfield's Fighting Five (1926), Sherman
introduces the reader to Lance Sparks, son of the wealthiest man in
Mayfield. Lance comes home to organize a high school basketball
team without the assistance of a gym or coach after spending a year
attending the high school in nearby Elton, county seat and home of
the defending state champions. Before Lance takes the initiative to
start a boys' high school basketball team, Mayfield had little to

offer and “felt the insecurity of a small town“ in relation to the

163
much larger Elton. “The only distinguishing point about Mayfield was

the fact that an interurban whizzed through the town once every
hour.“70 Elton, on the other hand, with a population of 30,000 had
already experienced industrial growth and boasted of its beautiful
high school gymnasium that sat 3,000 people.

Lance had never played basketball before going to Elton, but
while there he quickly learned that “basketball had become the king
of sports. The entire city of Elton had gone basketball mad. Boys
who played on the Elton High team were popular heroes and every
robust fellow in school was regarded as a possible star.“71 Lance
left Elton High and the chance of starting on the varsity squad
because he believed Elton to be “so all-fired stuck up with its own
importancel“72 He wanted to prove that Mayfield could compete with
the likes of Elton. Lance and sixteen other Mayfield boys began
practicing in a vacant lot through the heat of the summer and in a
small warehouse during the cold of winter. With no gymnasium,
Lance and the boys could only schedule a few away games during
their first season. Nevertheless, the team ventured to Elton at
season's end to play in the sectional tournament. Despite the lack of
game experience, Mayfield miraculously defeated Elton in the
championship game on Lance's last-second field goal.

At the beginning of Sherman's melodrama, Mayfield stood in
stark contrast to the industrialized Elton. Mayfield symbolized a
small rural village where the “gumption“ of a group of young men
could still make a difference in the town's fortunes. Elton, on the
other hand, represented a city that had already passed this stage of

economic development and could no longer completely recapture the

164
innocence of a Mayfield. Instead, the high school basketball team of

Elton High had become an instrument of the bureaucratic school
system and local Chamber of Commerce. Sherman wrote that Elton
was most proud of “its splendid Public school system“ and that “the
Elton Chamber of Commerce distributed advertising literature
inviting every one who did not live in Elton to move there
immediately.“73 The Elton High state championship team, along with
its glorious gymnasium, provided evidence of Elton's economic
progress, at the same time the team's success was a product of the
regulative, hierarchical social and economic order historian Robert
H. Wiebe described as typical of the new urban centers of the
Progressive Era."

By story's end, however, Mayfield begins to measure its own
success by Elton's standards. The town wants to immediately parlay
the team's victory over Elton into a new gymnasium as a symbol of

its own progress:

On the special interurban, crammed with the victory-crazed
Mayfieldites, which pulled out of Elton City that night, a
committee of loyal dark horse supporters- headed by Doc Brady
and including such prominent citizens as Principal Tucker,
Major Ellerbee, Jerry Evans and Lance's own father- took up a
collection toward a fund for the building of a fine gymnasium
on the vacant lot which had been the scene of so many faithful
practices the past summer.75

Once built, the new Community House stood as a monument to
Mayfield's spirit as displayed by Lance and his teammates'
determination. As the second book of the trilogy, Get 'Em Mayfield
(1927), begins, Jerry Evans, proprietor of Mayfield's General store,

points out to a traveling salesman that the town is no longer just a

165
sleepy rural village: “Look at the new buildings going up... that dry

goods store across the wayl... S'pose you heard about the new
factory coming here, too?... Mayfield's booming mam-booming!
Where have you been?“ When asked by the salesman to account for
this dramatic growth, Jerry simply says, “Basketball!“76 Later

Sherman writes:

Mayfield had gone on record as owing the boys an eternal vote
of gratitude for having engendered a spirit which had done
more to bring about real community cooperation and
development than any other factor in the town's history.77

No longer focused on the differences between Mayfield and Elton,
Sherman now portrays Mayfield as building itself in Elton's image.
Just like Elton, the basketball team and the new gymnasium act as
both the impetus for economic expansion and evidence of the town's
progress.

Not surprisingly, by the second book Sherman describes the
Mayfield basketball team not only as tough and determined, but also
as playing with “clocklike precision."8 The Mayfield Fighting Five,
like the Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle teams, had become
symbols for the values associated with industrial capitalism.
Sherman unwittingly revealed how high school basketball in Indiana
in the 19205 became a means for communities to comply with the
dominant order by celebrating values such as physical strength,
determination, and machine-like teamwork. The display of these
values offered hope for a better future to those living in towns like

the mythical Mayfield caught in the middle of change.

* t i

166
Although Indiana high school baskeball was produced by the

forces of domination, once created it became a subject for the
masses to interact with and change according to their needs and
desires. It is in this interaction between producer and consumer
that one finds the semiotic richness of pepular culture generally and
Indiana high school basketball in the 1910s and 20s specifically. In
many ways the desires of the large working class that supported
these teams complied with the values of the social reformers,
educators, and industrialists, but in other ways the coming together
at the high school gym offered an opportunity for the workers of
these towns and cities to express their resistance to forces of
domination. Indiana high school basketball in the 19103 and 20s
also allowed those subordinated by the new order to create their
own culture free from the ordinary social and economic restraints.
Though high school basketball games always contained expressions
of the dominant order, it concurrently contained expressions of

resistance.

167

Chapter Five Notes

1Muncie Evening Press, March 10, 1924, 5.
2Muncie Evening Press, March 9, 1923, 4.

3David G. Martin, “Gymnasium or Coliseum7: Basketball, Education
and the Community Impulse in Indiana in the Early Twentieth
Century,“ in Hoosier Schools: Past and Present, (Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996).

4New Castle High School Rosennial, 1922, 61-62. The daily
newspapers in Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle also covered the
YMCA junior league games and state tournament during these years.
Tracing the rosters of these teams in the Anderson Herald, Muncie
Morning Star. Muncie Evening Press, and New Castle Daily Courier
reveals that almost without exception these players subsequently
played on the high school team. Each high school's annual, the
Anderson High School X -Ray, Muncie High School Magician, and New
Castle High School Rosennial, also identified most of the players on
the team as former YMCA junior league stars.

5Phillip M. Hoose, Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana ,
Second Edition (Indianapolis, Indiana: Guild Press of Indiana, Inc.,
1995), 149-150.

6New Castle had a black player on their 1917 team and Muncie
Central's star center on their 1931 state championship team, 6'7“
Jack Mann, was black. But during the 1920s no black players played
on Anderson, Muncie, or New Castle high school basketball teams.
The ban on all-black and parochial schools was lifted in December,
1941 after Trester reversed his position in the face of mounting
political pressure initiated by Indiana's sole black legislator, Robert
Brokenburr. In light of black and Catholic soldiers going off to fight
in World War II, Brokenburr's campaign to allow all-black and
parochial schools into the IHSAA gained momentum. Public
sentiment at the time was that if blacks and Catholics could risk
their lives fighting in the war, they too should be allowed to play for
the IHSAA state championship. With the editorial backing of the
state's largest daily paper, The lndianapolis Star, and the support of

168

a growing number of other state legislators, Trester opened the
IHSAA to both black and parochial schools, Hoose, 155.

7The Anderson High School X-Ray, 1927, 107.
8Anderson High School X-Ray, 1915, 72-73.

9Report of these services appeared regularly in the local papers.
Two such examples can be found in the Muncie Morning Star, March 6,
1924, 9 and March 2, 1928, 5.

”New Castle Daily Courier, March 8, 1913.

11Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward
the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1968), 216-268, 482-511, 582.

12Ibid.
13The New Castle Daily Courier, March 8, 1913, 8.
14Anderson High School X-Ray, 1919, 91.

1 5Peter Levine, Ellis Island To Ebbets Field: Sport and the American
Jewish Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3-10;
Edward Ross, The Old World and the New (New York, 1913), 289-290.
See also, Donald Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 1880-1910
(Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983); T. Jackson
Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Dominic
Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban
Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia, 1981).

1“See Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the
19203 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California
Press, 1991) 17-23; Seymour Martin Lipset, “An Anatomy of the
Klan,“ Commentary 40 (October 1965): 74-83; Guy 8. Johnson, “A
Sociological Interpretation of the New Ku Klux Klan Movement,“
Journal of Social Forces 1 (May 1923): 440-445; Paul L. Murphy,
“Normalcy, Intolerance, and the American Character,“ Virginia
Quarterly Review 40 (Summer 1964): 444-459; James H. Shideler,

169

“'Flappers and Philosophers,’ and Farmers: Rural Urban Tensions of
the Twenties,“ Agricultural History 47 (October 1973).

1"Blee, Women of the Klan, 18.

18“Ernst and Ernst Report,“ 0.0. Stephenson Collection, Indiana
Historical Society. Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux
Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 (Chapel Hill 81 London: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1991), 46-50.

”Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census
of the United States, 1920 (Washington DC: Government Printing
Office, 1922), tables 1,8,9,10,11 and p. 316; Lynds, Middletown,
352.

2°Moore, 61-70.

21Muncie Post-Democrat, June 15, 1923, 1.

22Ku Klux Klan Reel #1, Archives Division, Indiana Commission on
Public Records. This number comes from testimony from Muncie
Klan leaders in a civil suit filed against 0.0. Stephenson.
23Certainly the $10.00 initiation fee caused many from the lower
class not to join. For unskilled workers at the time, this amount
equalled a quarter to a half of their average weekly income.
24Moore, 61-70.

25Moore, 101.

26Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers 8. Leisure
In An Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1983).

27Moore.

28Muncie Eveing Press, January 3, 1924, 4.

29Muncie Evening Press, December 15, 1920, 7.

30Muncie Evening Press, February 24, 1921, 5; March 7, 1921, 5.

170

31Muncie Evening Press, January 29, 1924, 7.

32New Castle Daily Courier, February 14, 1913, 8.

33Mrozek, 5.

34lbid., 3-27.

35Anderson High School X-Ray, 1914-15, 72.

36Anderson High School X-Ray, 1913-14, 54.

37Muncie Evening Press, January 28, 1913, 9.

38IHSAA Report of the Board of Control, 1917, 7.

3 9Roland Marchand, Advertising The American Dream: Making Way For
Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985), xix.

”Muncie Morning Star, March 13, 1926, 6.

41Muncie Evening Press, March 4, 1925, 7.

42Muncie Evening Press, March 19, 1925, 5.

43Muncie Evening Press, March 7, 1924, 4.

4‘IMuncie Evening Press, December 27, 1924, 5.

45New Castle Daily Courier, January 4, 1913, 8.

46Muncie High School Magician, 1921-22.

47Muncie High School Magician, 1922-23.

“Anderson High School X-Ray, 1913-14, 55.

49Anderson High School X-Ray, 1914-15, 70.

171

”Anderson Herald, February 12, 1921, 5; Muncie Evening Press ,
March 12, 1923, 5; Muncie Morning Star, March 11, 1926, 10, are but
a few examples of the papers using “machine“ to describe the
teamwork of the team.

51New Castle Daily Courier, January 30, 1915, 3.

52New Castle Daily Courier, March 8, 1915, 1.

53Muncie Evening Press, February 24, 1921, 5.

54Muncie Eveing Press, January 29, 1924, 7.

5 5Anderson High School X-Ray, 1914, 70.

56Anderson High School X-Ray, 1918, 62-63.

5 7Muncie High School Magician, 1916.

58New Castle High School Rosennial, 1922, 52.

59See Timothy P. O'Hanlon, “School Sports as Social Training: The
Case of Athletics and the Crisis of World War I,“ Journal of Sport
History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1982): 5-29.

6(’Susan Cahn, Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-
Century Women's Sport (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 99-100.

61Cahn, 86.
”lbid., 87.
63IHSAA Report of the Board of Control, 1924, 106.

64Herb Schwomeyer, Hoosier HERsteria (A History of High Schools
Girls Basketball), (Greenfield, IN, 1985), 113; Martin.

65Schwomeyer, 287.

66Schwomeyer, 43; Martin.

172

67J. Anna Norris, “Basketball,“ in Trilllng Papers, General Subject
Files - Basketball, Women's Phys. Ed. Papers, University of
Wisconsin Archives, as quoted in Cahn, 99.

6 3See Nancy F. Cott, The Bands of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere“ in
New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1977) for a good explanation regarding the cult of domesticity.

59New Castle High School Rosennial, 1919, 95.

70Harold M. Sherman, Mayfield's Fighting Five (New York: Grosset &
Dunlap, 1926), 6, 29.

7‘lbid., 9.
72lbid., 47.
73|bid., 7.

7‘iRobert H. Wiebe, The Search For Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1967).

758herman, Mayfield's Fighting Five, 56-57.
76Sherman, Get “Em Mayfield (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1927), 2.
77lbid., 11.

78lbid., 55.

CHAPTER SIX

An Amusement For the Community:
High School Basketball as an Expression of Cultural Resistance

While a nostalgic longing for a simpler time, ethnic
identification, and hope for the future all found expression in the
early support for Indiana high school basketball, the new spectator
sport simultaneously offered an opportunity for the industrial
workforce to assert a measure of resistance to an imposed social
order. As with other forms of mass entertainment that emerged
around the turn of the twentieth century, Indiana high school
basketball provided a chance for consumers to negotiate with
producers in creating new cultural meanings.l The local high school
gymnasium became a middle ground where an increasingly alienated
working class and self-proclaimed cultural arbiters could meet and
generate alternative meanings.2 Though the cultural patterns
produced by reformers, educators, and boosters were deeply
embedded in Indiana high school basketball, it also offered workers
and their families a chance to express themselves free from the
relatively tight social and economic control imposed at work and
school.3

At a high school basketball game rules and unruliness balanced
each other precariously. Increasingly separated from the restraints

of a nineteenth-century genteel culture, people by the 19103 and 20s

173

174
felt free to express themselves at these games. While demanding

discipline, obedience, and cooperation from the high school
basketball teams they supported, fans in the stands sometimes
acted undisciplined and disobedient. The gymnasium became a place
where people celebrated a temporary suspension of hierarchical
rank. With the usual restraints of society momentarily lifted, fans
behind the anonymity of a large crowd challenged the control of the
dominant order.4 Akin to the pro-industrial carnivals and festivals
where customary roles were reversed, hierarchies overturned, and
social restraints suspended, high school basketball games became an
institutional way for those living in a newly industrialized society
to transform traditional values and social roles. While the fans
celebrated the values of the established social and economic order
as displayed on the court, they simultaneously mocked it by their
unrestrained and irreverent behavior in the stands.5

Consider a game at the end of the 1917-18 season between
Anderson and Muncie high schools. A natural rivalry had developed
between these cities because of their close proximity, comparable
size, and similar economic development. Since the late nineteenth
century these cities had battled each other for economic supremacy
in this region of Indiana. Reflecting the competition of these two
cities as manifested by the race to construct high school
gymnasiums in the 19203, spectators from each city got especially
keyed up when the two teams played each other. In this way, the
fans actually mirrored the competitive nature of the capitalistic

social and economic order.

175
But the manner in which spectators expressed this

competitiveness at these games often conflicted with the value of
self-control Progressive Era social reformers wanted to instill in
the players!5 When Anderson came to do battle with Muncie on March
1, 1918, “antagonism among certain spectators was evident from
the start of the game.“ In a heated and close game, an Anderson and
Muncie player found themselves in a fight for a loose ball. At the
same time, two other players from opposing teams went to the floor
in a tussle, and spectators began to spill onto the floor to join the
melee. When the Anderson coach, Alan Staggs, stepped onto the floor
to try and stop the fighting, “a crowd of young fellows started after
him.“ After a Muncie fan actually struck the visiting team's coach, a
group of Anderson players literally formed a ring around Staggs “to
prevent the increasing crowd from getting to him.“ After Coach
Staggs and his team made it safely into their locker room, the
Anderson team decided to forfeit the game and not risk venturing
back into the hostile gym.7

The riotous crowd at this Anderson-Muncie game represented
the freedom from social restraints many felt at the high school gym.
Instead of merely being passive recipients of the values social
reformers, educators, or industrialists wanted to instill in the
production of high school basketball, these spectators became
actively involved in changing the nature of the game. While
displaying the thirst for winning inherent in a capitalistic society,
by joining the fray, the fans also took part in interrupting and
destroying the discipline and order of a game meant to impose a

particular value system.

176
Preserved as a place where people could act out without fear

of the consequences, these games offered release from the
pressures of modern life. As demonstrated by the 1918 Muncie-
Anderson game, this release sometimes manifested itself in
physical aggression against fans of an opposing team. The previous
year's game between the two teams ended similarly with an
altercation between each side's supporters. No longer restrained by
outside economic or social considerations, spectators literally
fought for their team. The New Castle Daily Courier also regularly
reported this sort of fan aggression at New Castle High School
basketball games. During a game in 1915 against Connersville High
School, for example, the paper described spectators as running onto
the floor, calling players names, and throwing chewing gum, pencil
stubs, and “anything else handy“ in an effort to influence the
outcome.8 A week later during the sectional tournament at
Richmond, Indiana, fans from New Castle and other teams once again
joined in creating a reckless and hostile environment. The paper
reported that the supporters of one team routinely banged drums or
yelled “hoots' loud enough to drown out the organized cheers of the
opposing team's fans. According to the New Castle Daily Courier, “no
such disgraceful scene had been witnessed in the state of Indiana
and no such unsportsmanlike attitude had been shown... as long as
can be remembered.“ Often the fans of opposing teams actually got
in gang fights at the conclusion of these games.9

Beyond the taunting and fighting, spectators joined in creating
a carnival atmosphere at the games simply by their over-

enthusiastic support of their team. High school basketball games

177
became a time when people could momentarily “let go.“ The papers

of all three communities typically described the fans as “maniacs“
creating a “perfect pandemonium.“” The noise was often described
as so loud that the referee's whistle could not even be heard.11 The
Muncie Evening Press described the half-time festivities at a 1923
regional championship game in Fort Wayne, Indiana between

Kendallville and Muncie Central high schools in this way:

Intoxicated with the proverbial joy at their first half triumph,
Kendallville's drum corps sallied forth on the playing floor,
trying to out-noise the Muncie Central High band. The Muncie
band soon afterward got out on the floor also, and there was a
terrible racket.”

The paper described the fans at a 1924 New Castle-Muncie game as a
“seething mass of excited humanity.“13 Even considering the
hyperbole common to journalistic writing during this era, the
spectators at these games clearly displayed an “unrestrained joy“
and enthusiasm.14

Instead of demanding discipline and self-control, high school
basketball games provided the fans a chance to lose their public
decorum and participate in a spirit of recklessness. It was ironic
that in the 1920s such behavior took place in gymnasiums that often
expressed classical principles of architectural design. Inspired by
the Greek gymnasium and approved by educators still trained under
the classical curriculum, the design of these facilities conveyed a
vision of order through their grandeur, unity, and symmetry. But on
cold winter Friday and Saturday nights, these structures could

barely contain the disorderly enthusiasm inside.

178
Describing the quarter-final game of the state championship

between Muncie and Richmond, the Muncie Central's 1923 yearbook,
The Magician, provides a glimpse at the spectator's unbridled
enthusiasm. A reported twelve thousand people “swelled the
Coliseum“ at the Indiana State Fairgrounds to watch a game
prognosticators had predicted Richmond would easily win. Spurred
on by an enthusiastic crowd, both teams exhibited tremendous
intensity right from the start. “Y-e-e-e-a-a-a, Bearcatsl Let's
fightl“ came the war-cry from the Muncie supporters. After a go-
ahead field goal by star forward, Walter “Tootie“ Thornburg, Muncie's
fans “want wild, and the cheering had not died down when BANGI
Tootie popped in another one. OH BOYI Never will we forget the
noise that one field goal createdl Seemed like the whole auditorium
was pulling for a Bearcat victory.“ The lead and momentum changed
hands several times throughout the first and second halves, adding
to the already intense atmosphere. After Richmond pulled slightly
ahead in the second half, Muncie climbed back to tie the score. “By
this time the great crowd... was going plain 'nutty' over [the] great
up-hill fight...“ When the Bearcats took a 31-30 lead with seconds
to go, “the roof, no doubt, had a hard time to hold to the rafters as
pandemonium let loose.“ After a 33-30 victory over Richmond “the
Muncie section plainly looked like a mob of maniacs....“15

At the end of the twentieth century such a scene at a sporting
event seems unremarkable. Fans going crazy in this manner at a
college or professional basketball or football game today is common,
but in the 1910s and 203 athletics as mass entertainment that

engendered such unrestrained passion were new to American culture

179
generally and Indiana culture specifically. In contrast to the social

reform origins of school athletics, the sort of environment created
by fans at games like the Richmond-Muncie contest was cause for
concern among many educators. They worried that a community's
intense interest in the outcome of these games would ultimately
cause schools to place too much emphasis on basketball at the
expense of academics. The concern expressed by the school teacher
in Angelo Pizzo's 1986 movie, Hoosiers, that too much emphasis on
basketball could harm the academic progress of her students was
representative of a national trend among educators during the 1910s
and 20s that lamented the emerging popularity of school sports.
Remember J.T. Giles,1912 President of the IHSAA, who worried that
excessive fan involvement in high school basketball might cause an
“over indulgence... of those who do participate.“”

Despite these educators' best attempts, communities
continued to fanatically support their local high school basketball
team. As a result, athletic associations financed by boosters
persisted in hiring coaches, giving players special privileges, and
constructing gigantic gyms. Phillip M. Hoose, Indiana high school
basketball historian and folklorist, has described these formative

years of Indiana high school basketball as full of corruption:

Winning was everything; amateurlsm was a cynical joke.
Merchants rewarded winning coaches with bonuses - once a
Pontiac sedan - and players with gold watches. Coaches went
after the parents of any tall boy who could shoot a lick,
promising the father a better job In their town.17

The locus of control over high school basketball had

effectively changed hands. Educators and reformers could not stem

180
the tide of basketball's popularity. As a result, a symbiotic

relationship formed between producers and consumers of the games.
Boosters, the Chambers of Commerce, and local business discovered
a new way to generate economic development for the city while the
people of these communities found a space somewhat free from the
forces that otherwise controlled their lives. It should not be
assumed, however, that just because their relationship in many
ways was mutually beneficial that some ideological consensus
developed between classes in the production and consumption of high
school basketball. Inherent in Indiana high school basketball's
popularity was a conflict of interest, not a liberal pluralism where
differences were subordinated in order to maintain the status quo.
In this conflict one can see the engine for cultural change.

The producers preferred that the people watching the games
behaved in an orderly, disciplined, but enthusiastic manner. And in
some ways the fans at the games displayed values, such as
competitiveness and loyalty, consistent with the dominant culture.
But when the spectator's enthusiasm boiled over into unruly
behavior, the educators, reformers, and business leaders saw reason
for concern. Those with power had an interest in maintaining the
status quo, in protecting the system that advantaged them. This
meant tight control over all aspects of community life, both work
and leisure. But as shown by their raucous behavior, part of the
attraction of these games for those in the working class was the
opportunity to publicly display a freedom from social restraint.

Reformers, educators, and business leaders must have

especially been concerned when fan enthusiasm grew into a direct

181
challenge to authority. The fan attack on Coach Staggs during the

1918 Anderson-Muncie game, for instance, amounted to an inversion
of the social order. A good indication of the extent of this inversion
can be seen in a Muncie Evening Press editorial during the 1924
season under the headline, “Don't Give Them Too Much Advice,“ that
warned the peOple of Muncie against questioning every decision
Coach Murray made. Like a scene out of Hoosiers, the editorial
stated, “a thing that should be strictly forbidden is permitting
outsiders to throng into the players' dressing room either before a
game or between halves. It is at such times that the 'fans,‘ with the
very best of intentions, may utterly demoralize the team.“ The paper
concluded that if people really had to tell the coach and his players
what to do, they should wait till after the games. Unlike at work,
church, or even home, people at a high school basketball game
fearlessly questioned authority.”

This challenge to authority included instances when fans also
challenged an official's competence. The local papers routinely
reported that spectators openly questioned the judgment of an
official. Fans experienced such a close identification with the
players that they took calls against the team personally. Not unlike
today, many fans want as far as blaming losses on poor officiating.
After a disappointing loss to rival Muncie in 1917, for example,
Anderson supporters predictably pointed to the officiating as the
cause: “This [the loss] is due to the fact that the officiating was so
partial to the Muncie lads that it would have been next to impossible
for the Anderson High School five to win under any conditions.“ The

Anderson Herald reported that “in the opinion of many Anderson

182
rooters, all the Crawfordsville 'official' lacked was a Muncie

uniform. He was just like a regular member of the team and was
easily its hardest worker.“19 Reduced to just another player in the
drama of a basketball game, the paper symbolically knocked the
official down from his authoritative position.

As an act of resistance, questioning a coach's or official's
authority is pretty mild. The fact that any challenge to authority
was limited to a high school basketball game demonstrated the
hegemony of the dominant culture. But at a time when the forces of
industrialization and consumerism came together, these acts
signified a deeper impulse of the working class to reserve a space
free from social control and fear of economic repercussions. The
regular criticism against referees and other representatives of
authority at these games indicated a more general hostility many
felt regarding their subordinated role in society. At the high school
gym they could freely and openly express their anger, whereas at the
workplace, where their economic security hung in the balance, they
could not.

Area educators and businessmen reacted to the growing
unruliness of the spectators by trying to incorporate their
expressions of resistance into the dominant value system basketball
represented. By trying to absorb cultural meanings of resistance
into the games, acts of resistance inherent in the games‘ popularity
became a part of the continuing development and changing nature of
Indiana high school basketball.20 Through pep rallies, cheerleaders,
and yell practices, the promoters of the games tried to reestablish

the dominant order and eliminate any oppositional meanings

183
expressed by the unbridled enthusiasm of the fans. Sponsored by

athletic associations and booster clubs, organized cheering became a
way to instill the values of the dominant order into the behavior of
the spectators. The producers hoped that these measures would
assure an orderly, disciplined, cooperative, yet enthusiastic form of
fan support instead of the sort of mayhem common at these games.

Notices of “yell practices,“ for example, regularly appeared in
the Muncie papers before big games, Inviting everyone including
parents, relatives, townsfolk, and students to attend. After practice
the business manager of Muncie's athletic association chartered
vehicles to transport the congregation of “organized“ rooters to the
game. Once at the game, they sat in a block section and performed
the yells they learned under the direction of the “yell leader.“21 The
Anderson Herald described a similar scene at a 1921 game between
Anderson and Franklin: “T he cheering was the best heard this year.
Most of the high school pupils were congregated in the south balcony
and went through a series of new yells in regular fashion under the
leadership of Charles Heritage and Pup Corder.“22 Though the
primary yell leaders were usually male, the years surrounding World
War I also witnessed the emergence of female cheerleaders at
Indiana high school basketball games: “The Muncie High School girls
gathered on the west bleachers and did some most effective yelling
under the leadership of Miss Mary Fortney, who also assisted Hacket
in leading the general yelling.“23

In addition to organized yelling, the promoters of high school
basketball tried to channel the excitement over an upcoming big

game into an organized “pep rally“ where enthusiasm could be both

184
fostered and contained. Before Anderson played in the 1921 state

finals, for example, the Anderson Herald exhorted “every Anderson
basketball fan, high school student or 'outsider' who will go to
Indianapolis, to attend a big pep session... to be held in the high
school auditorium...“ At this rally Orlando Jay, the head of the
printing department at the high school, distributed “several hundred
cards“ with five yells printed on them!M Before the 1924 regional
tournament, Muncie fans first held a “rousing chapel“ that featured
local pastors and the YMCA director giving talks on the team. At
this service “the student body pledged its support to the team
through thick and thin whether they were able to follow them to the
tourney center or not.“ Following chapel the congregation was led to
a “mammoth pep session... under the direction of Cheer Leaders
Andrews and Addison.“25

In both of these instances, the promoters tried to channel the
fans' unrestrained enthusiasm into an orderly, even prayerful,
display of support for the local team. Pre-game pep rallies and yell
practices offered a way to encourage the town's loyalty and
excitement for the team while at the same time instilling a measure
of the dominant order back into the spectacle of high school
basketball. Just like the team, the fans were expected to mirror the
dominant value system with their show of obedience, cooperation,
sacrifice, and prayerful dedication. At these rallies people were
reminded of the intended role high school basketball played in the
life of the community. If, during the course of the game, people
could momentarily free themselves from the daily pressures of the

dominant order, pep rallies acted to remind everyone of the inter-

185
connectedness of the town's economy, school, and basketball. In

1919, the New Castle High School's yearbook, The Rosennial, showed

that this message was at least getting through to the student body:

Supporting an athletic team means more than joining the
Athletic Association and going to the games. It means getting
back of every team that wears the New Castle colors and
boosting for all that you are worth. When a “pep“ meeting is
called, get down in the front row, raise the roof, then go to the
game and do twice as much howling as you did the first time
your dad licked you. Talk up the team and the games. On the
street, in your home, wherever you may be. Then when the
business men of the town find that the school is whole-
heartedly behind the team they will double the support that
they now give to the high school team. First back them [the
team] yourself, and the business men of the city will back
you?6

Despite the best efforts of educators and boosters, these
measures were not entirely successful. Consider again the 1915
Richmond sectional in which New Castle participated. There the
organized yells of one team's fans were constantly being drowned
out by the hoots, boilers, and drum banging of another team's
supporters.” Or on March 1, 1918, when Muncie held a “big yell
practice in the high school auditorium“ the afternoon before their
annual clash with Anderson. After practice the Muncie rooters even
went to greet the arriving Anderson crowd at the train station to
show off their organized support of the team. Hours later at the
game, the Muncie and Anderson fans broke into a “near riot“ that, as
described earlier, ended with Anderson's Coach Staggs being
physically attacked by Muncie rooters.28 Clearly, organized yelling
or pep rallies did not always have the desired effect of creating an

orderly, cohesive, and disciplined rooting section. The fans found

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ways to resist the efforts of educators and boosters to incorporate

this unbridled enthusiasm into the production of the games in such a
way as to diffuse its expression of oppositionality.

Instead of offering a way to exercise social control, the pep
rally and yell practice reveal how high school basketball became a
middle ground for producers and consumers. In these displays of
enthusiastic support for the team, one can find the cultural impulses
of each. As shown by the fans' enthusiastic support,
competitiveness, and civic pride, the producers and consumers
expressed shared values. But for the predominantly working class
fans, the games also offered a release from the restraints of
everyday life. For educators and boosters, on the other hand, high
school basketball also provided an opportunity, besides other things,
to instill values of discipline, obedience, and a corporate morality.
By encouraging the fans to “raise the roof“ at yell practices and
rallies, the boosters and educators found a way to meet the
spectators' desire to escape from the demands of industrial life
while offering a way to reassert a degree of discipline and order
into the proceedings. In short, the producers in their effort to
maintain and expand the p0pularlty of high school basketball were
forced, to some degree, accommodate the wishes and desires of the
working class.29

Yell leaders exemplified this accommodation. Meant to provide
hierarchical order to the fanatical support of the team, these
leaders at times contributed to the inversion of traditional cultural
norms at these games. Besides the fast and physical play of the

teams on the court, these yell leaders became another form of

187
exciting, uninhibited amusement. They, like the minstrelsy, circus,

vaudeville, and movies, satisfied a mass desire for sensory appeal
and emotional release in the midst of a highly regulated industrial
economic and social order. Like the performers of these other forms
of entertainment, the yell leaders often provided a theatrical
presence that lured spectators further away from their routine
existence.30

Tamer versions of the freaks featured at the sideshows and
exhibits at the Bowery, they fascinated spectators with displays of
unconventional behavior. Take, for example, the self-named twins,
“Ike and Mike,“ that led cheers for the Muncie Bearcat's 1920-21
season. According to the high school's annual, The Magician, they
lived up to their various names. the “Jazz Twins,“ “Human Nuts,“ and
“Sensationalists,“ by keeping “the crowd in riotous laughter between
the halves and whipping them into a yelling mob before and during
the games.“ Along with the Bearcats, “they worked to produce the
spirit that filled the gymnasium game after game to witness the
performance of these two combinations.“ With bodily contortions
and clown-like antics, yell leaders like Ike and Mike became part of
the show. Meant to organize an often times hysterical crowd into a
cohesive demonstration of enthusiastic community support, yell
leaders actually offered yet another way for people to escape the
demands and restraints of the outside world.31

At the high school gymnasium on cold winter Friday and
Saturday nights, the combination of the intense action of the
basketball game and the orchestrated cheering of the yell leaders

and fans made for a carnival-like atmosphere. People could

188
momentarily experience sensual pleasures not offered in their

otherwise disciplined existence. In this way the spectators actively
created an alternative culture to the dominant order. While the new
cultural arbiters of the twentieth century continuously tried to
diffuse cultural meanings of resistance, the spectators always
found ways to preserve the high school gymnasium as a place
reserved for sheer pleasure. In this way the working class fans
actually used the resources provided them by the dominant system,
be it the excitement of the game or the antics of the yell leaders,
for their own purposes of release and escape.

A Neo-Marxist might question the ability of spectators at a
sporting event such as high school basketball to either evade or
create an alternative to the dominant order of industrial capitalism.
Nee-Marxism preaches that sport spectatorship only diverts
potentially revolutionary energies away from political action. As
Allen Guttmann has explained. a Nee-Marxist believes “the protest
against political and economic injustice is drowned out by the
spectators' mindless screams of ecstasy and rage.“ In addition, they
believe spectator sports serves a cathartic function that only acts
to strengthen capitalism's hegemony. From this perspective sport
spectacles such as Indiana high school basketball creates a safety
valve for aggression caused by a repressive capitalistic society. In
such a society, the Nee-Marxist believes workers sublimate their
sexual energy into productive labor. Sporting events act as a
secondary sublimation by offering a venue for people to exhaust any
excess repressed energy that cannot be utilized in the economic

system. Finally, the rage and anger that should be turned toward the

189
ruling class is instead directed against the opposing team.

Furthermore, the Neo-Marxist believes a working class
consciousness cannot develop because feelings of loyalty are formed
around an allegiance for the team instead of around economic
subordination. Rather than offering an alternative culture, spectator
sports, by allowing people to release pent energy and to displace
feelings of oppositionality. merely reinforce the dominant economic
and social order.32

The Neo-Marxist would be right that Indiana high school
basketball between 1911 and 1929 did nothing to fundamentally
change the industrial-capitalistic system. The emergence of mass
culture generally, and Indiana high school basketball specifically,
during these years did, in many ways, support the furtherance and
strength of the dominant order. Besides deflecting any serious
political action against the system, the popularity of high school
basketball served well the interests of a consumer culture that
financially benefited those in power. But to focus only on how
interest in these games advanced Industrial capitalism's influence
ignores expressions of resistance by the average working-class fan.
No, the act of going to the high school gym to support the local team
did not offer a chance to radically change the system, but it did
enlarge the space in which the working class had to operate. By
having space reserved solely for individual and communal pleasure,
the working class at least found one place where they could

influence their relationship to the dominant order.33

190

Chapter Six Notes

1See John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of
the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 4, 9.

2The notion of the middle ground between producers and consumers
comes from two sources: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians,
Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Peter Levine, Ellis
Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). White uses the concept
to discuss the process of negotiation between cultures, whereas
Levine uses it to explain the process of negotiation between
generations.

3 See Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in
Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1986) and Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will:
Workers 8. Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).

4See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984) for a comparative look at
how the carnival acted as a temporary liberation from the prevailing
truth of the established order. Also look at Fiske, Understanding
Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989) 79 for a discussion of
how sport can offers a place where order and control exists in
tension with disruption and disorder.

5See Bakhtin, Kasson, p. 50, and Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).

6See James Naismith, Basketball: Its Origin and Development (New

York: Association Press, 1941), 187. Naismith listed as one of the

values of basketball to be instilling “self control, the subordination
of one's feelings for a purpose.“

7Muncie Morning Star, March 2, 1918, 9.

8New Castle Daily Courier, February 27, 1915, 3.

9New Castle Daily Courier, March 8, 1915, 1.

191

”Muncie Morning Star March 6, 1920, 10, Munce Evening Press, March
17, 1923, 1, March 14, 1924, 1, and Anderson Herald, March 17,

1918, 1, are but four examples where this sort of language was used
to describe the atmosphere at high school basketball games.

11Muncr'e Evening Press, December 20, 1920, 5, January 14, 1924, 1,
December 20, 1924, 7.

12Muncie Evening Press, March 12, 1923, 5.

13Muncie Evening Press, December 24, 1924, 7.

14Muncie Morning Star, January 28, 1928, 1.

15The Magician, 1923.

16Address from President of the Indiana High School Athletic
Association, J.T. Giles, 1912, from the IHSAA Handbook and Report of
the Board of Control, 1912, 7.

17Phillip M. Hoose, Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana,
2nd edition(lndianapolis, IN: Guild Press of Indiana, Inc., 1995) 92.

1liMuncie Evening Press, February 9, 1924, 4.

19Anderson Herald, January 20, 1917, 6.

”See M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), Umberto Eco, Travels in
Hyperreality (London: Picador, 1986), and Fiske, 19.

21The Muncie Evening Press, February 9, 1916, 6.

22The Anderson Herald, January 26, 1921, 7.

23Muncie Morning Star, March 5, 1920, 12.

24Anderson Herald, March 17, 1921, 5.

25Muncie Morning Star, March 8, 1924, 9.

192

26The Rosennial, 1919. 84.

”New Castle Daily Courier, March 8, 1915, 1.

28Muncie Morning Star, February 28, 1918, 11 and March 2, 1918, 9.
29Fiske, 43.

30899 Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American
Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Kasson.

3 1 The Magician, 1921.

32Allen Guttmann, Sports Spectators (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 149.

33Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill 8 Wang,
1975) and Fiske, 54-55.

Chapter Seven

Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of the Hoosier Myth

An Indiana different from the images of small towns,
cornfields, and farm houses exists In the northwest region of the
state along the shores of Lake Michigan. Known as the Calumet
Region, the cities of East Chicago, Hammond, and Gary each have
traditionally contained large African American, Slavic, Polish, and
Catholic populations since the turn of the twentieth century. Unlike
the rest of the state, the large and diverse working class in these
steel towns have traditionally voted Democratic and belonged to
large national unions. Gary in particular, with its numerous steel
mills, dilapidated city streets and buildings, intense poverty, and
predominantly African-American population stands outside the
pastoral image of Indiana.

The same year Muncie Central won its first state basketball
championship, 1928, the all-black Gary Roosevelt High School opened
its doors amidst racial tension in the region. Like Crispus Attucks
High School in Indianapolis, Gary Roosevelt was denied membership
in the IHSAA until 1941. Because young people learned basketball
during the first three decades of the twentieth century primarily
through the YMCA and physical education programs of public schools,
two establishments not readily accessible to African Americans at

the time, young blacks in cities like Gary learned the game largely

193

194
outside institutions of social control. As Nelson George writes,

“basketball was the by-product of a very rational, very rigid, very
white world of values and institutions“ during the first years of its
existence.1 But by the 1920s African-American educators around
the nation initiated efforts to organize athletic associations around
the web of all-black colleges and high schools spawned by the 1896
Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision. Young African Americans
now had an official venue to develop their athletic skills and
influence the way the game of basketball was played.

In 1933 Gary Roosevelt played for the first time in the
National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament (NIBT), organized by
Charles H. Williams, physical education director at Hampton
Institute. At this national tournament for all-black high schools,
Gary Roosevelt emerged as the premier team, easily defeating the
Henderson Institute of North Carolina in the championship game, 37-
6. Roosevelt dominated the competition for the next eight years and
proved to be a “crucial incubator of Black basketball style."2 In
1934, 1935, 1937, and 1938 Gary hosted the tournament in the city's
7,000-seat Municipal Auditorium. Overall attendance at the event in
1935 reached nearly 12,000.3

Despite its success in the 19305, Gary Roosevelt stands
outside the lore of Indiana basketball. The style of basketball
developed outside the watchful eyes of white Protestant social
reformers, educators, and boosters contained much louder
expressions of resistance than that played in communities like
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle. While the more structured style

of play in the rest of the state reflected the values of the dominant

195
order, African Americans in Gary. excluded from the social

institutions of the mainstream, were free to develop a style that
spoke to their marginalized status in society. As early as the
1920s, African Americans around the country began playing a freer,
more improvised style of play common today at the high school,
college, and professional level. Like jazz musicians, these players
rebelled against symbols of social restraint and embraced the
freedom of movement the game of basketball offered.4

For most Hoosiers before, during, and after the 19203 and 303.
however, basketball was primarily about restraint. Although
expressions of resistance did appear in the stands of high school
games, fans in places like Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle insisted
that their high school teams demonstrate discipline, obedience, and
teamwork, values consistent with the goals of the dominant
economic and social order. The sometimes apparent contradiction in
meaning between the behavior of fans in the stands and the style of
game they lnsisted their team play resulted from a reaction to a
complex set of social and economic currents that converged at the
same time high school basketball became a popular spectator sport.

In reaction to the fragmentation and alienation many
experienced as a result of rapid migration, urbanization, and
industrialization, pe0ple looked for ways to rediscover a sense of
community akin to the small rural village of the nineteenth century.
But at the same time, for those who migrated to the burgeoning
cities of Indiana during the first three decades of the twentieth
century, industrial capitallsm also offered hope. Their support for

the local high school basketball team represented these conflicted

196
feelings. Supporting the team provided an opportunity to rediscover

a sense of community while also celebrating values consistent with
the new industrial economic order, even if beneath the surface of
the expanding working class's search for community in these cities
were feelings of frustration and hopelessness with their economic
and social subordination. This explains the impulse of fans at these
games to temporarily over-turn the existing social structure while
simultaneously endorsing the system that created it.

Ethnic identification also became intertwined with the search
for community through Indiana high school basketball in the midst of
this dramatic economic and social transformation. Many living in
predominantly homogeneous cities like Anderson, Muncie, and New
Castle, also wanted a community that looked like the nineteenth-
century small rural village. The emergence of the Ku Klux Klan as a
powerful political force in Indiana between 1915 and 1925
represented this desire for the imagined community to mirror the
white, Protestant, and native-born population. The values
demonstrated by the local high school basketball players became
associated in the minds of many with this ethnic culture. This
explains why African Americans have largely been left out of the
iconography of Indiana high school basketball.

Because Indiana high school basketball developed out of the
social and education programs of the Progressive Era and became
popular amidst the consumer culture of the 1920s, its cultural
meanings have been primarily compliant with the dominant economic
and social order. Add to this the distraction of ethnic

identification, meanings of resistance, though not totally absent,

197
have been relatively weak. Hoosiers' fascination with high school

basketball over the years has symbolized a diehard conservative
embrace of the American Dream where good-old-fashioned white
boys employ the Protestant work ethic on their way to victory.
Indiana high school basketball continued to grow in popularity
after the 19203 until 1960, the year the IHSAA reported a record 1.6
million in paid attendance during the annual state tournament.5
However, since then state-wide attendance during the tourney has
steadily declined until less than a million fans paid to see
tournament games in the mid-1990s.6 Even in the hotbed of Indiana
high school basketball, Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle, gyms are
no longer consistently filled to capacity during regular-season or
tournament games. During the 1993-94 season, for example, the
Muncie Central Bearcats were ranked among the state's top-ten
teams all season long and made it to the final eight of the state
tournament. Despite the school's long tradition of success (eight
state titles) and a winning team, attendance at the games dropped
for the third year in a row. The largest crowd of the year was only
5,000.7 This was quite a change from the 1950s when Bearcat
season tickets were sometimes included in divorce decrees.8
Among the most popular reasons given for this decline in
interest are: school consolidation, television, and simply too many
other things to do. The argument goes, consolidation of smaller
rural schools into larger centralized schools broke the tie between
community and team. From the 19203 to the 19505 over 800 teams

from every nook and cranny in the state played in the tournament,

1 9 8
whereas in 1996 only 385 competed.9 As a result, students and

their families now live miles away from each other, making it more
difficult for fans to identify with the players. It is now less likely
that one personally knows the players or the players' families. In
addition, the ever-growing number of cable stations on television
offers an assortment of college and professional basketball games
to watch and an excuse for students and their families to stay at
home for entertainment. Even basketball junkies can get their fill
by watching games transmitted almost nightly into their living
rooms. Why venture out on a cold winter night to watch high school
kids play basketball when you can stay at home and watch the best
athletes in the world do the same thing? Tom Hession, radio and
television broadcaster of the state finals since 1966, said, “the
people in my community (Shelbyville, Indiana), probably know the
Georgia Tech players better than they know the Shelbyville
players.“1° To make matters worse, with malls, movie theaters, and
other places to hang out pOpping up on nearly every street corner,
students no longer have to go to a high school basketball game to
socialize.

Whether you accept these reasons or not, the direction of
Indiana high school basketball undoubtedly changed course in the
19605. For fifty years after the first IHSAA-sanctioned tournament
in 1911, the game was inextricably linked to the culture of the
state. For the last four decades its grip on the consciousness of
Hoosiers has gradually loosened. At the height of its popularity in
1958, John R. Tunis wrote about Indiana high school basketball's

popularity in this way:

199

Businessmen, housewives, kids, the president of the Merchants
National Bank, the chief of police, that loafer in the booth at
Hank's Bar and Grill, the farmers turning on their television
sets out on the National Road, and Doc Showalter, the local
osteopath, all know basketball. They know it, love it, live it.11

Now it is common for many in small to medium-sized cities of
Indiana to not even attend a single high school basketball game all
season.12

Though its popularity over the last four decades has waned,
high school basketball in many ways remains an important symbol In
Indiana for a value system associated with the state's rural
tradition. The intense debate surrounding the 1996 IHSAA decision
to end the single-class state basketball tournament underlies its
importance to many.13 Ron Newlin, former Director of the Indiana
High School Basketball Hall of Fame in New Castle, Indiana, has said
“we resist class basketball for the same reasons we resist
affirmative action and collective bargaining. As the sons and
daughters of self-sufficient agricultural entrepreneurs, we believe
in natural selection.“14 The drama of the annual single-class
tourney signifies a deeply embedded nostalgic longing for the days
of small rural villages and yeoman farmers.

The 1986 movie Hoosiers, starring Gene Hackman, Dennis
Hopper, and Barbara Hershey, draw upon Indiana high school
basketball's symbolic link to the state's rural tradition to present a
fresh portrayal of a tired “David beats Goliath“ sports story. This
film employed every icon of Indiana high school basketball: small
rural town, white farm boys with military-style haircuts turned

basketball players, disciplinarian coach, packed gymnasium, over-

200
involved townsfolk, basketball goals over barn doors, and, most

importantly, a team that passed the ball at least three times before
shooting, ran back cuts to the basket, set hard picks, learned to
sacrifice individual fame for the good of the team, and played in-
your-face, man-to-man defense.

Most fans of basketball know by now that the movie was
loosely based on tiny Milan High School's stunning upset of Muncie
Central in the 1954 state championship game. Under the tutelage of
Marvin Wood, this undermanned team from a town of just 1,200
people slowed games down with deliberate passing in order to have a
chance against the bigger, faster teams from the larger schools. It
worked. A Muncie Morning Star article before the game reported that
“Milan just doesn't take bad shots. It passes the ball beautifully, a
matter of teamwork perfected by six years of practice. The all-
senior starting Iine-up has been operating since the sixth grade.“15

After Milan's victory, the Muncie paper described the game like this:

Those mighty mites from Milan, representative of one of
the smallest schools ever to win the IHSAA crown, turned back
the big Bearcats of Muncie Central in a breath-taking final
game, 32-30.

Milan, a people's choice team since the tournament
campaign started, won its first state championship by forcing
the taller Bearcats to play the Milan game...

Refusing absolutely to match offensive strength with the
Bearcats, Milan played a perfect cat-and-mouse game, holding
the ball until able to get drive-in shots, shooting fouls with
deadly precision, and waiting for a big chance that came when
(Bobby) Plump hit the field goal that proved that the little
teams from the little schools can win this greatest of state
high school tournaments.16

From the moment it insured Milan's victory, Bobby Plump's shot has

been the most famous moment in Indiana's sporting history. It also

201
made Plump the non-official poster boy for all that Indiana

basketball represents.

Plump and his team became perfect symbols for the myth of
Indiana basketball because they reconnected Hoosiers to a simpler
time. Milan in 1954 proved that despite the industrialization,
modernization, and growing population experienced by the state
during the first half of the twentieth century, Indiana at its core
still stood for values associated with its rural past. The Milan
Indians in the iconography of Indiana basketball represent hard work,
self-sacrifice, egalitarianism, team-work, discipline, and merit --
all values associated with the state's nineteenth-century pastoral
tradition. The fact that this team comprised of white farm boys
defeated a racially diverse team from an industrialized city like
Muncie only added to the symbolic significance of the team. The
1954 champions offered a tangible way for Hoosiers to re-imagine
their community free from modernity's effects which included
urbanization, industrialization, alienation, fragmentation, and
racial, ethnic, and religious diversity.

Greg Guffey in his 1993 book, The Greatest Basketball Story

Ever Told, described the effects of Milan's championship in this way:

The pride is still there (Milan), because something great
happened in 1954. Drive through many similar towns in
southern Indiana and try to find that pride. There is
resentment, bitterness, and talk about big cities and suburbs
killing their way of life. No regrets hang over Milan. That
title was so great because it was won by ten boys who had
only the expectation of becoming the next generation of
farmers. It was a community of people helping, mainly
because no one knew any differently. It was their way of
life....17

202
Milan, because of its 1954 high school basketball team, lives on in

Indiana as symbol of a pre-industrial, close-knit community.

Plump, Milan's hero, embodied the simple life many in Indiana
longed for. He lived in a two-story house on a dead-end street in
Pierceville, Indiana that did not have electricity until 1948. In
addition, he cites his religious father as his biggest influence.
Uneducated but a hard worker, his father taught Plump the
importance of dedication and discipline by providing for his family
by working a variety of low-paying jobs.18 These values people
believed Plump and his teammates displayed in winning the
championship, and they presumably learned them because of where
and by whom they were raised.19

A significant reason for the decline in Indiana high school
basketball's popularity since 1960 has been the inability to sustain
the relevance of the Milan myth. The beginning of the end for this
myth's cultural relevance came during the two years following
Milan's championship. In 1955 and 56 the all-black Crispus Attucks
High School of Indianapolis dominated its opponents to win back-to-
back state championships, remarkably making them the city's first
champion over the tourney's first forty-four year history. Not even
allowed to participate in the IHSAA tournament until 1941, the Ray
Crowe-coached teams of Crispus Attucks during the mid-50s were
the antithesis of Milan. They came from the state's largest city,
were all black, and won by playing an improvised, loosely structured,
fast-paced style of game. Crowe, African American, but raised in
the almost exclusively white Johnson County just south of

Indianapolis, resented it when sportswriters compared the fancy

203
play of the 19505' Crispus Attucks teams with that of the Harlem

Globetrotters. “The Globetrotters were showmen and even though
some of my players ended up playing for the Globetrotters, I didn't
want my kids showing off that way... I taught good, fundamental
basketball and I'd prefer to have people remember that we were
fundamentally sound as opposed to being showmen.“20 But nobody,
not even Crowe, could deny that Crispus Attucks executed those
fundamentals in a faster gear than the other Indiana high school
teams.

Led by future University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati Royals, and
Milwaukee Bucks great, Oscar Robertson, Crispus Attucks traveled
the state easily defeating every opponent they played except one, a
57-58 loss to Connersville High School early during the 1954-55
season. In 1955 they played another all-black segregated school,
Gary Roosevelt, in the state championship game.

What a contrast from the previous year when Milan won the
championship game 32-30 over Muncie Central. Two all-black
schools that just fifteen years earlier could not even participate in
the IHSAA tourney now competed for the most coveted championship
in Indiana sports. Unlike the championship game of 1954, Crispus
Attucks easily won in a high scoring affair, 97-74. Wilson “Jake“
Eison, starting center for Gary Roosevelt's team, member of the
1955 Indiana All-Star team, and eventual teammate of Crispus
Attucks' center Willie Merriweather at Purdue University, described
the 1955 finals as a competition between two fast-break teams that
routinely pushed the ball up the court and generated easy scores

from their aggressive defense. Eison remembered that unlike the

204
1954 final between Milan and Muncie Central, most fans from New

Albany and Fort Wayne North Side, the two teams that lost the
Saturday afternoon semi-final games, left Indianapolis in anger
before that night's championship game was played. Though both
teams enjoyed strong support from their respective communities,
the game between two all-black schools did not capture the interest
of basketball enthusiasts in the state's outlying towns and cities.21

During the 1956 season Crispus Attucks completely destroyed
every team they played. So much better than the competition, they
beat the state's tenth-ranked Michigan City High School team, 123-
53. In this game Robertson set a new city-county scoring record
with forty-five points.

With his size, ball-handling, passing, rebounding, and shooting
touch, Robertson introduced fans to a new style of basketball many
now associate with Earvin “Magic“ Johnson. Robertson took control
of almost every game he played and Crispus Attucks won forty-five
consecutive games, easily beating Lafayette Jefferson High School,
79-57, for its second straight title. Lafayette Jefferson's head
coach, Marion Crawley, later said, “I don't think we could have beat
them if we'd had some players from up the road [Purdue University].
My boys played as near to perfect as they could and they still lost by
twenty-two points. I don't believe I've ever seen a more dominating
team.“22

Fans flocked to see the Crispus Attucks Tigers during the
1955-56 season. Nearly 12,000 peOple came to watch them play
their home games in the Butler Fieldhouse. Basketball aficionados

were curious to see this new style of play that so dominated Indiana

205
high school basketball for two years. The contrast between the

1954 and 1955 seasons represented a dramatic paradigm shift in
Indiana culture. The exploits of Robertson and his teammates in
1955 had more of an impact on the hearts and minds of Hoosiers than
the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education,
Topeka, Kansas that effectively ended imposed school segregation
but did not gain court-ordered adherence in Indiana until 1971. Until
the Crispus Attucks teams of the 19505, many in Indiana could still
not imagine the reality of desegregated schools. However, as young
black men raised on the inner-city playground courts of Indianapolis
and Gary started to make an impact on Indiana high school
basketball, coaches, administrators, and boosters began coveting
their talent. The desire to win created a demand for the
considerable skills of African-American basketball players, thus
bringing about the beginning of the end to three decades of
segregated schools in Indiana.23

If Milan reinforced the values Indiana basketball stood for,
Crispus Attucks challenged them. Once African Americans were
given a chance to influence the nature of a game that meant so much
to Indiana, the relationship between predominantly white
communities around the state and high school basketball forever
changed. It would never again be so easy to imagine their community
without considering the skilled Robertson and his teammates on the
1955 and 56 Crispus Attucks teams.

The decade following the championship seasons of Milan and
Crispus Attucks, African Americans in Indianapolis and other cities

around the country began taking the game of basketball to another

206
level. Robertson, who learned the game on the playgrounds of the

Lockfield Gardens Housing Project in the 19505, took his
considerable skills to the larger stage of the NBA by the early
19605. Along with Robertson, African Americans such as Elgin
Baylor, “Connie“ Hawkins, Walt Hazzard, Wilt Chamberlain, and later
Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul Jabbar), among others, emerged out of
America's cities to revolutionize the game. How could the game ever
be the same with 6'5“ point guards, players hanging in the air on
their way to the basket, behind-the-back no-look passes, and
graceful and athletic 7 footers? Not by accident, the decline of
Indiana high school basketball's popularity corresponded directly
with this basketball revolution.24

In the context of these changes in the game, Hoosiers began
losing faith in the myth that basketball was best played by white
young men who learned the values of discipline, team work,
obedience, and self-sacrifice in small-town America. They still
loved their basketball, but the image of the farm-boy ballplayer
began to loose its cultural significance.

Amidst the declension of Indiana high school basketball,
remnants of the Hoosier myth remain. During these years fans of
Indiana basketball have consistently looked for icons that can
reconnect them to their past. Every so often a new “white hope“ of
basketball straight from the farm or small town emerges. Whether
Rick Mount from Lebanon, Larry Bird from French Lick, Steve Alford
from New Castle, or, most recently, Damon Bailey from Heltonville,
fans from Indiana since the 19605 have looked to these players as

torchbearers of the Hoosier basketball tradition. Since the late

207
19805 Indiana high school basketball has produced African-American

NBA stars like Shawn Kemp, Glen Robinson, and Calbert Cheaney, but
Bailey, who after playing for Indiana University played on Fort
Wayne's Continental Basketball Association (CBA) team, has
consistently drawn more state-wide press coverage and fan
attention ever since mentioned in John Feinstein's 1986 A Season On
The Brink. In the consciousness of most Hoosiers, Bailey, who did
lead Bedford-North Lawrence High School to the 1990 state
championship, is more identified with Indiana basketball than any of
these far more talented players. Indicative of the state's hero-
worship of these small-town players, 41,046 fans, doubling the
national record for attendance at a high school basketball game,
packed the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis to watch Bailey play in the
1990 state-championship game. Without the attraction of Bailey or
some other white hope, only 16,185 paid to watch the championship
game just four years later.25 The Indiana Pacers made a market-
sawy decision to draft Bailey in 1994 only to cut him after a year
on the injured-reserve list. Though never playing a single game for
the Pacers, during the 1994-95 season one could observe thousands
of youngsters, primarily white, throughout the state wearing
Bailey's Pacer jersey. Hope for some in Indiana springs eternal.
Many believe the last nail in the coffin of Indiana high school
baskeball's cultural significance came in the Spring of 1996 when
the IHSAA decided to do away with the country's only single-class
state basketball tournament. In 1997 each team for the first time
competes in one of five class tournaments organized according to

school size. It is now impossible for a team from a small school to

208
upset the Muncie Centrals of the world for the state championship.

Despite the best effort of Plump who formed “Friends of Hoosier
Hysteria,“ an organization that lobbied to save the single-class
tournament formats, the miracle of Milan will never be repeated.

Because of changes in the game and the diminished role of the
high school in the community, high school basketball can no longer
serve the function it once did in Indiana communities like Anderson,
Muncie, and New Castle since the 19105. Milan in 1954 became the
state's last link to its homogeneous and rural past. Though Indiana
maintains its conservative tradition in politics, at the end of the
twentieth century attending a local high school basketball game no
longer evokes feelings of nostalgia. As the images recaptured in the
movie Hoosiers fade in the memory of those living in the state, going
to the high school gym on a cold winter Friday night increasingly

becomes a ritual void of its historical and cultural significance.

209

Chapter Seven Notes

lNelson George, Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball (New
York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), 15.

2lbid., 28.
3|bid., 30.
4|bid., 1-19.

sIHSAA Handbook, 1960.
6IHSAA Handbooks, 1961-1995.
7Drew Lindsay, “On Assignment,“ Education Week (March 1, 1995) 27.

8From an interview with Morry Mannies, WLBC radio announcer for
Muncie Central Bearcat games since 1956, lbid., 26.

9!ndianapolis Star, April 29, 1996, 1.
10Lindsay, 27.
11John R. Tunis, The American Way In Sport (New York: 1958) 85.

12An observation I had from numerous conversations with people in
Anderson, Muncie, and New Castle while doing the research for this
dissertation.

13See Phillip M. Hoose, “The Big Dance“ in Indianapolis Monthly,
(March, 1996): 96 for an impassioned argument to preserve the
single-class tournament. Bobby Plump, who helped tiny Milan win
the state championship in 1954, fought mightily to keep the single-
class tourney by forming a lobbying group called “Friends of Hoosier
Hysteria“ that included such notable basketball stars as Johnny
Wooden and Oscar Robertson.

14lbid., 7.

15Muncie Morning Star, March 19, 1954, 3.

210

l6Muncie Morning Star, March 21, 1954, 1.

1"Greg Guffey, The Greatest Basketball Story Ever Told
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 19.

18lbid., 118-119.

19lbid., 19. Guffey cites an advertisment taken out by twenty-five
local businesses in the Versailles, Indiana Republican newspaper
after Milan won the state title. In it the businesses attributed the
team's success to the hard work and determination the players
learned in a small town.

2°Kerry Marshall, The Ray Crows Story: A Legend in High School
Basketball (lndianapolis: High School Basketball Cards of American,
Inc., 1992) 84.

21January 26, 1997 interview with Wilson Eison.

2 2lbid., 149.

23Phillip M. Hoose, Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana
(Indianapolis, IN: Guild Press of Indiana, Inc., 1995), 143-194.

24For a more in depth examination of the influence of African
Americans on basketball, see George.

2 5Lindsay, 27.

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