Win, Lose, and Drawing Conclusions: Bellows, Boxing, and Progressivism

Peter A. Adams

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
7 (Summer 1992). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 1992, Organization of American Historians

Simplicity, directness, high aesthetic value, cultural diversity, and accessibility make George Bellows's painting "Both Members of This Club" an almost perfect historical "document" for analysis from numerous perspectives. It can be used to evaluate the impact of the Progressive movement, the artist as social critic, art as historical documentation, and ethnicity with its traditional linkage to sports. "Both Members of This Club" has elements of visual high drama that rapidly captured the attention of those high school students who visited the National Gallery of Art with me to view Bellows's work. For one advanced placement history student, the experience was sufficiently strong that a year later he vividly recalled our discussion regarding "the Bellows," noting how it had been "the first time anyone had enabled him to see beyond just the painting." He also clearly remembered the details in the painting and how he and I had made the others wait because it was not on this particular tour's itinerary and our detour caused us to be late for our bus.

Use of paintings such as "Both Members of This Club" provides educators with a moment to contemplate how non-print documents can be used effectively to introduce students to another world of historical communication. They also generate an interest in the vernacular culture of a period. The visual excitement of a piece frequently facilitates analysis, generating a high level of interest among students. Most quickly become involved in the initial descriptive process and the subsequent analysis that permits them to examine historical eras "from the bottom up" (1).

At the conclusion of this exercise, the student should be able to:

1. demonstrate an understanding of the difference between descriptive and analytical skills;

2. understand that sport traditionally has been seen as an avenue for social and economic success among ethnic groups in the United States;

3. recognize how an artist sometimes functions as a social critic;

4. analyze documents with the intent of gaining insight into gender and ethnic roles in American society; and

5. explain how the changing nature of a sport is frequently linked to changes in the larger culture.

Born in Ohio in 1882, George Bellows attended Ohio State University where he excelled in baseball, but his art work in the school newspaper won equal attention for its merits. At Ohio State University he gained an awareness of contemporary social injustices that would influence his art. Bellows earned money to study by drawing illustrations for an Ohio newspaper and by playing semi-professional baseball. He moved to New York City in 1904 and joined the New York School of Art. There he worked under the auspices of Robert Henri as a junior member of a group of artists that painted blunt and harsh scenes of mundane city life, the realism of which earned them the nickname "Ash Can Artists." The fact that Bellows and his colleagues made contact with earthy types living in a rugged city reveals itself not only in their paintings but also in their accounts of spirited drinking bouts and subsequent fisticuffs. Historians tend to give their literary equivalents more attention, but the work of Bellows and the other members of Robert Henri's school of art chronicled life in America in much the same way as did Jacob Riis, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. Although conservatives within the art community branded Bellows and his colleagues with the pejorative "Ash Can" title and rebuked Henri and the others for being "apostles of ugliness," they established themselves as American artists in the tradition of Winslow Homer who captured on canvases scenes typically American. Walt Whitman compared the "Ash Can" artist Thomas Eakins to Homer since each painted what he saw and not what ought to be (2).

It is hard to imagine that Bellows could not have been sympathetic to the Progressive political movement considering his Midwestern roots, and his arrival in the East at a time when many had grown concerned with the disparity in wealth among Americans. Economic panic and despair marked the first decade of the twentieth century for many Americans. Farmers and immigrants, who had settled in large urban areas, felt particularly set-upon politically, economically, and socially by the well-to-do. Bellows became a contributor to The Masses, a socialist periodical. Art historians Ariane and Michael Batterberry describe Bellows as a "lifelong fighter for human rights," but caution that Bellows and the others produced art more "as reports of real life in the city than as a criticism of unfair social conditions" (3). Bellows gained his early reputation, and reported his "real life" painting scenes from the sport of boxing, which had risen to a level of acceptance--if not respectability--by the turn of the century.

This shift of public opinion regarding boxing began as a result of reforms launched in the nineteenth century. After 1867, widespread adoption of the Marquis of Queensberry rules, which required the use of gloves, introduced three minute rounds, and "ten count" knockouts, gained some respectability for the sport. Subsequently, athletic clubs won the right to sponsor fights which led to the first heavyweight championship bout to use gloves held in 1892. Saloons, particularly in large urban areas, sponsored bouts that drew upper class gentlemen ("ladies" never went), seeking the excitement of the athletic contests and the wagering that accompanied them. Passage of the Horton Law of 1896 in New York City gave legitimacy to these contests, and the saloons adopted "membership rules" allowing them to function as bona fide clubs. John L. Sullivan, an Irishman, lost his bout in 1892 but had followed in the footsteps of earlier Irish Americans, John Morrissey and James C. Heenan, both of whom had claimed national championships and helped establish Irish American domination of the sport. Thus boxing, like baseball during the 1830s and 1840s, had become a means of achieving social and economic well-being for an ethnic group that faced continued widespread discrimination. Although newspaper and journalistic accounts of fights helped establish boxing as a symbol of masculinity, it failed to gain nationwide legitimacy which meant that it maintained a stigma and remained a strictly male world until the 1920s (4).

It was this world that Bellows captured in his paintings. He frequented a private club across the street from his studio operated by former pugilist Tom Sharkey. The bouts featured contenders, all of whom became "members" for the night in order to ensure legitimacy. Fights took place in a small room with the audience crowded close to the ring in an atmosphere filled with cigar smoke and screams, reeking with the smells of beer and sweat. Bellows's first effort, "A Knockout," completed in 1907, established a new venue for him to which he returned on numerous occasions. He later produced such notable works as "Club Night" and "Stag At Sharkey's." In 1909, he completed a work that he originally entitled "A Nigger And A White Man," but which he later changed to "Both Members of This Club." That Bellows chose to retitle his painting suggests that he had an understanding of how boxing in particular (and we can say sport in general), became a means by which marginal citizens could progress socially or economically by playing to an audience drawn from the dominant culture. The athletes knew that they functioned as "members" only for a specified period of time and only if they played by the social rules as well as the rules of the game.

In "Both Members of This Club," the climatic moment in a fight is captured as one of the two fighters, an African-American, apparently has overwhelmed the other. This second fighter, garbed in green trunks, is bloodied and his knee buckles so that he appears on the verge of a backward collapse. The audience watches intently, not missing any nuance of the violent scene. They sit close to one another and to the ring itself. Batterberry comments that "we can sense the sweaty violence of the fight, and hear the earsplitting cries of the spectators and the heavy thuds of leather gloves striking bruised jaws and bodies." Charles H. Morgan, Bellows's biographer, informs us that "Bellows showed his two antagonists locked in a pyramid of frustrated equality, while his customary ringside characters went through their ruthless (and ageless) pantomime below" (5). One of my students suggested that the fixed smile on the countenance of a spectator at the center of this ghoulish setting might well have been the prototype for Batman's fiendish archenemy, the Joker. Regardless of the descriptive analysis, what seems eminently clear is that an African-American is boxing with a white boxer dressed in green trunks for the pleasure of an all-male audience, and the viewer has a ringside seat to a bloody, grotesque scene. The scene provides us with an array of questions that can establish for students a sense of our complex social webbing.

Was Bellows making a critical comment about the use and perhaps abuse of ethnic minorities for the pleasure of their socio-economic betters? As an artist and as a Progressive, had he seen an injustice that he sought to present to the public for their enlightenment? Morgan suggests that minstrel shows popular during the period had provided the motivation for Bellows's choice of an African-American contestant. I suggest to my students that perhaps Bellows had taken up the cry of W.E.B. Du Bois and Ray Stannard Baker who had advised Americans at the time that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the "color line." Events of the period certainly helped bring this issue into focus (6).

Bellows, it is clear, did not live in a social vacuum and was sensitive to political issues of the day. Was Bellows's effort an artistic equivalent of yellow journalism? Placing him within the boundaries of the Progressive impulse makes sense and provides the instructor with another way of talking about this era. Bellows's work also helps the teacher raise contemporary issues regarding class, ethnicity, and gender. This can be further amplified if the teacher introduces the fact that after 1909 Bellows did not paint another fight scene until 1924.

His "Dempsey and Firpo" (1924) conveys a different message. The audience, the boxers, and referee all help capture the excitement of the moment of victory, but gone is the flavor of the less respectable Sharkey's club with its raucous blood-seeking crowd. The gentlemen watching Dempsey knock Firpo from the ring have removed their hats. There remains wild cheering, but neither of the adversaries are bloodied and a ring official stands nearby making certain that the fight remains clean. "Dempsey and Firpo" seems sterilized, a report of a historic event rather than an incisive look at what today might be called a "happening." Of course, by the 1920s, muckraking and social concerns had given way to the "jazz age." Instead of the gospel of wealth that Andrew Carnegie had preached stating that everyone could be rich, people looked around and to a great extent believed that everyone should be rich, and boxing had gained an air of respectability (7).

Judging from my past experiences, the use of several different approaches to this material seem equally valid. The instructor might introduce a unit about progressivism with the paintings, or as a reinforcement activity that demonstrates the Progressive Era's impact on American society. Used in tandem, a teacher can effectively demonstrate a societal shift within a historical era. Used by itself, "Both Members of This Club" has also provided me with an opportunity to explore questions about linkages between ethnicity, class, and sport. Obviously the materials used can be expanded to demonstrate current social attitudes about sport, if someone wishes to pursue this "Rocky" road.

I usually begin the investigative process by showing students, who have already been introduced to the Progressive Era, a slide of Bellows's "Both Members" painting. They are asked to examine the work carefully and to make a list of what they "see," using descriptive statements. I encourage them to explore all possible approaches, including the artist's technique in the use of color, light, and perspective; details of action; character representation; and even the size of the work and the title. This can take an entire period and I give students as much time as they require since I implore them to overcome the fear of listing something they may conceive of as being "so obvious," and insist that they seek (and occasionally they do find) a detail that I might have missed. I then ask them to share their lists with the class. Without exception students always note that there are two men fighting and that the black man appears to be winning. Their lists most frequently produce the following lines of questioning:

• Why did Bellows choose to paint an African-American as a contestant?
  
• Who is winning? Is this important?
  
• The bloodied face of one contestant invariably raises the question: Is there blood on the faces of the audience?
  
• Why is the arena so dark?
  
• Do you think that there was an official in the ring?
  
• Why is it an all male audience? What are other characteristics that we can ascribe to the audience?
  

If no one picks up on the fact that the bloodied fighter is wearing green trunks, I point this out and ask them to speculate about how this might be symbolic, noting the preponderance of Irish fighters during this era. Once they are convinced that Bellows could have intended for his audience to acknowledge that the "other" fighter was Irish, I ask why that might have been likely and whether a reason existed to have an Irishman in the contest.

When using both paintings, I introduce the "Dempsey and Firpo" piece and I solicit ideas about how it is different from the earlier work. I now ask for two lists--the first containing descriptive comments regarding "Dempsey and Firpo" and a second in which students are requested to make comments about differences in the two. Students are struck by the fact that the second painting "looks more real," or "almost like a photograph," in their typical remarks. They usually note that the official is prominently at front center, and that the scene seems better lighted, as if in a boxing arena.

Time restraints usually dictate a movement away from close consideration of Bellows's technique. If time permits, however, we discuss his lighting, use of triangular organization, and how, through the use of the ring's ropes, he places his audience "within" the paintings. This done, I lead the discussion toward what pos-sible motivation caused Bellows's construction of two different pictures conveying his view of the sport of boxing. The historians' argument that progressivism had reached its zenith by World War I, and the rise of the "jazz age" lifestyle of the 1920s, is drawn quite easily into focus interpreting the paintings. I want to draw students directly to the conclusion that a change in social, economic, and political situations had changed both Bellows and American society. Such an approach does, however, provide the instructor with an introductory wedge that can be used to juxtapose the role of sport and popular culture with other forces that have shaped American culture.

Instructors wishing to expand the lesson and demonstrate the links between sport and class behavior might consider having students read from Giuseppe Giacosa's 1898 account of the behavior of students from Yale and Princeton following their Thanksgiving day football game in New York:

In the evening, the streets and theaters are jammed with students, but the flower of American youth has begun to fade and gives forth the odor of alcohol. . . . They stagger tipsily through the streets, sunk in a dark darkness, without a ray of merriment. . . . This brutal viciousness is equally characteristic of the rich and poor, even making allowances for differences in the quality of their drinking and of its inebriating capacity, for the latter rises in inverse proportion to the former. It is well known that in the very exclusive clubs the most fastidious members come in on foot, but go out in the small hours on the backs of their servants who bundle them into carriages (8).

That links exist between sport and the larger society appear so obvious that I believe by neglecting the role of such avocational activities in our history classes, we deny students the opportunity to explore more fully their cultural heritage. Intellectual justifications aside, the use of sport topics often provides an avenue of interest that draws in otherwise disinterested students. That such links exist in art and literature should provide additional incentive to integrate sports into the history curriculum.

1. Two works providing introductory material pertaining to sport history are Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1983), and Steven A. Riess, The American Sporting Experience: A Historical Anthology of Sport in America (West Point, N.Y.: Leisure Press, 1984).

2. For more insights into the Ash Can school, see Lillian Freedgood, An Enduring Image: American Painting from 1665 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), and Oliver W. Larkin, Art and Life in America (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1960).

3. Ariane Ruskin Batterberry and Michael Batterberry, The Pantheon Story of American Art For Young People (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 126.

4. Boxing's emergence as a sport is chronicled nicely in Melvin L. Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.) For a discussion of race and boxing in the Progressive era, see Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and The Era of White Hopes (New York: The Free Press, 1983). More general information regarding sport and urbanization is contained in Steven A. Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

5. Charles H. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (New York: Reynal & Company, 1965), 101-102. Additional biographical information and a color reproduction and description is contained in John Wilmerding, American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art (New York: Hudson Hill Press, 1970).

6. Richard Hofstadter's The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963) remains one of the best sources of information and interpretations of the Progressive movement. The relationships between ethnicity, politics, and urbanization are the driving force of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. 2nd ed. (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1970).

7. Descriptive information about the period worth reviewing can also be found in Mark Sullivan, The Turn of the Century, Volume 1 of Our Times, 1900-1925 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971).

8. Giuseppe Giacosa, Impressions of America. Reprinted in The Annals of America, Vol. 13, "1905-1915: The Progressive Era." Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1968.

Reproductions of Bellows's "Both Members of This Club" can be obtained from The Department of Photographic Services, National Gallery of Art, 6th Street and Constitution Ave., Washington D.C. 20565.

Reproductions of Bellows's "Dempsey and Firpo" can be obtained from The Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10021.

Peter A. Adams is the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaurate History Teacher at Laurel High School, Laurel, Maryland. His dissertation is in the field of Popular Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, Department of American Studies.