Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  More productive in terms of its linguistic impact was a much later introduction to America, bridge, which arrived from Russia and the Middle East in the early 1890s. The word is unrelated to the type of bridge that spans a river. It comes from the Russian birich, the title of a town crier. Among the expressions that have passed from the bridge table to the world at large are bid, to follow suit, in spades, long suit and renege.16

  At about the time that bridge was establishing itself in America, a native-born gaming device was born: the slot machine. Slot machines of various types were produced in America as early as the 1890s, but they didn’t come into their own until 1910 when an enterprising firm called the Mills Novelty Company introduced a vending machine for chewing-gum, which dispensed gum in accordance with flavours depicted on three randomly spinning wheels. The flavours were cherry, orange, and plum – symbols that are used on slot machines to this day. Each wheel also contained a bar reading ‘1910 Fruit Gum’, three of which in a row led to a particularly lavish payout, just as it does today. Also just as today a lemon in any row meant no payout at all – and from this comes lemon in the sense of something that is disappointing or inadequate. The potential of slot machines for higher stakes than pieces of chewing-gum wasn’t lost on the manufacturers and soon, converted to monetary payouts, they were appearing everywhere that gambling was legal, though no one thought to call them one-armed bandits until the 1950s.17

  Partly in response to the popularity of gambling, a pious young New Englander named Anne Abbott invented a wholesome alternative in 1843: the board game. Board games like chess and checkers had of course been around for centuries and in almost all cultures, but never before had anyone devised a competitive entertainment in which players followed a path through a representation of the real world. Abbott intended the game not just as an amusement, but as an aid to upright living. Called The Mansion of Happiness, it required competitors to travel the board in pursuit of Eternal Salvation, avoiding such pitfalls along the way as Perjury, Robbery, Immodesty, Ingratitude and Drunkenness. The idea of moving a playing piece along a route beset with hazards was hugely novel in 1843, and not only made Abbott a tidy sum but also inspired a flock of imitators.

  One was a young man named Milton Bradley, who produced his first hit, The Checkered Game of Life, in 1860. Also morally uplifting, it was clearly inspired by, if not actually modelled on, Abbot’s elevating divertissement. Bradley’s most original stroke, however, came when he devised a way of packing eight separate games, among them checkers, chess, backgammon and dominoes, into a small, easily portable box, which proved a hit with soldiers during the Civil War.

  Rather more innovative was George Swinton Parker, founder of the second great name of the American games industry, Parker Brothers. Born into a venerable but declining family in Salem, Massachusetts, Parker loved the idea of board games, but hankered for a reward more immediately gratifying than future salvation. In 1883, aged just sixteen, he created a game called Banking in which the object was to speculate one’s way to wealth. A new games-playing ethos was born, one that seized the imagination of Americans. As the writer Peter Andrews has put it: ‘Instead of the most pious player reaping the most joy in the next world, the smartest player got the most money in this one.’18

  With two of his brothers, Parker built the family firm into the biggest games company in the world. Parker himself invented more than a hundred games – or, more accurately, more than a hundred variations of essentially the same game. Almost always they were built around some world event or technological breakthrough that had recently seized the popular imagination. Among his more popular creations were Klondike, Pike’s Peak or Bust, The Motor Carriage Game, War in Cuba, The Siege of Havana and The Philippine War (death and destruction proving nearly as irresistible to games players as accumulating a pile of fantasy money).

  But the game that secured the company’s fortunes was not invented by Parker or anyone else connected with the company. It was created during the early years of the Depression by one Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman from Germantown, Pennsylvania, who sketched out the prototype on a piece of oilcloth spread out on his kitchen table. He called his game Monopoly. In 1933 Darrow submitted the game to Parker Brothers in the hope that the company would manufacture it on a large scale. The Parker Brothers executives dutifully tried the game but weren’t impressed. They concluded that it had ‘52 fundamental errors’. For one thing there was no finishing-line, no visible ultimate goal. The idea of going around the board again and again struck them as faintly absurd. Then there was all this confusing business of mortgages and variable rents. All in all, the rules were too complicated and the game took too long to play. Clearly it would never sell, and they politely turned him down.

  Undaunted, Darrow made up some games himself and took them to Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia, where they became a small sensation. When Parker Brothers learned of this, they decided to give the game a try on an experimental basis. In the first year, Monopoly sold a million sets, a figure unknown in the world of games, and it has remained the best-selling board game in America ever since. His faith in the game vindicated, Darrow retired to an estate in the country, where he grew orchids and counted his money.

  Monopoly was the great craze of the early 1930s, but crazes had been a feature of American life since the 1820s when the word unexpectedly took on the sense of a sudden widespread mania. (Previously it had signified something cracked or broken.) The curious thing about crazes is that they are usually invented elsewhere but taken up in America with such enthusiasm and panache as to make them seem native born. Such was the case with one of the great nineteenth-century crazes, roller skating, a pastime invented in Holland and introduced to America in 1863.

  While Europeans were juddering unsteadily along cobbled streets, Americans were building vast skating palaces like the Casino in Chicago and the Olympian Club Roller Skating Rink in San Francisco. Such places could accommodate up to a thousand skaters at a time on their polished ash and maple floors. Often they had their own orchestras, playing tunes to which the audience could perform the latest, American-invented steps like the Philadelphia Twist, the Richmond Roll, the Picket Fence and the Dude on Wheels.

  Much the same happened with the bicycle. Before an Englishman named J. I. Stassen coined the term bicycle in 1869, two-wheeled vehicles had gone by a variety of names: velocipedes, dandy horses, draisines and boneshakers. Boneshakers was particularly apt. Early bikes ran on wooden wheels, had wooden saddles and of course ran over much less smoothly paved surfaces. Early models were propelled either by pushing the feet along the ground or by means of a complicated treadle mechanism. Most came without brakes. They were, in short, neither safe nor comfortable. But they were hugely popular.

  Soon people everywhere were getting in on the mania for wheeling, as it was known. Cycling quickly developed its own complex terminology. The more energetic adherents went in for scorching or freewheeling (sometimes shortened by the linguistically debonair to freeling). Scorchers who showed a selfish disregard of others were known as road hogs. Such was their capacity to startle or surprise other road users – one popular model was called the Surprise – that in some places laws were passed requiring cyclists not simply to slow down and dismount when approaching a horse, but to lead it to safety before continuing.19

  As early as 1882 people were referring to them familiarly as bikes. Such was the popularity of the sport that in 1885 a playing-card company in Cincinnati was inspired to try to cash in on the craze, which is how Bicycle brand playing-cards came about. By the mid-1880s cycling seemed to be as popular as a sport could get, but in 1888 came the invention of the pneumatic tire by the Scotsman John Dunlop, and other developments like lighter frames, handbrakes, gears and safety chains, and biking moved on to a higher plane of popularity.

  A large part of bicycling’s popularity was that it was one of the few exhilarating enjoyments permitted to women, though some authorities worried that p
erhaps it was too exhilarating. The Georgia Journal of Medicine and Surgery for one believed that cycling was unsuitable for females because the movements of the legs and the pressure on the pelvis of the saddle were bound to arouse ‘feelings hitherto unrealized by the young maiden’.20 The Wheelman magazine defended bicycling as a healthy pursuit for women, but added this ominous warning to its female readers: ‘Do not think of sitting down to table until you have changed your underclothing.’

  By 1895 ten million bicycles crowded America’s roads, and manufacturers were producing a vast range of vehicles with jaunty, buy-me names like the Sociable, the Quadrant, the Rudge Triplet Quadricycle, and the Coventry Convertible Four in Hand. The craze looked set to run and run, but less than a decade later most people had packed up their bikes for ever, having lost their hearts entirely to the greatest of all American passions, the automobile.

  The first two decades of the twentieth century were a period of relative calm in the world of crazes, but in the 1920s America made up for lost time. Among the phenomena that gripped the nation in that lively decade were dance marathons, flag-pole sitting competitions (the champion was one Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly who maintained his perilous perch atop a Baltimore flagpole for twenty-three days and seven hours), beauty contests, coast-to-coast car races, coast-to-coast foot-races known as bunion derbies, and miniature golf.

  Miniature golf – at first called dwarf golf – was born in 1927 when a developer named Garnet Carter built a resort hotel called Fairyland on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee and added a miniature links complete with mechanical hazards. He intended it as a diversion for children, but to his astonishment the adults soon drove the mites off. Realizing that there must be something in this, Carter formed a company called Tom Thumb Golf and began producing factory-built courses. In just three years 25,000 Tom Thumb courses were erected across America.21

  At home, three other forms of amusement entered the American vocabulary in the period. One was mahjong (or mah-jongg), a game from China that swept the nation beginning in 1922. Mahjong – the name is Mandarin for ‘house sparrow’, from a figure on the most important piece – was particularly fashionable among the smart set (a term roughly concurrent with the birth of the game in America). People paid up to $500 for their mahjong sets – more than the cost of a Model A Ford. Some even redecorated rooms of their houses in the Chinese style and invested in silk robes for themselves and their guests to help the mood along. For a decade or so, you couldn’t hope to move in society if you didn’t know the difference between a South Wind and a Red Dragon, or failed to comprehend cries of ‘Pung!’ ‘Chow!’ and ‘Broke the wall!’22

  Rather less fashionable but no less influential was ouija. (The name is a portmanteau of the French and German words for ‘yes’.) Ouija, in which devotees place their hands on a small pointer that glides across the board picking out letters and numbers in response to questions, was invented sometime in the nineteenth century (accounts vary considerably both to year and place) but found a ready following in America in the 1920s, to such an extent that the Baltimore Sun appointed a Ouija Editor. As a popular entertainment ouija had faded by the 1940s, though occasionally it popped back into popularity and even sometimes into the news, as in 1956 when the descendants of an heiress named Helen Dow Peck discovered to their horror that she had left her considerable fortune to a John Gale Forbes – a person of whom she apparently knew nothing – because his name had been revealed to her during a session with a ouija board almost forty years before. Fortunately for the descendants, no such person could be found and they got to keep the money.23

  The final component of this home entertainment trio of the 1920s was the one that proved the most durable: the crossword puzzle. At first called a word-cross, the crossword puzzle was invented in 1913 by an Englishman employed by the New York World newspaper, but it didn’t catch on in a big way until a small publishing company called Simon and Schuster published a crossword puzzle book in 1924. As with mahjong and ouija, it quickly became a national passion, to such an extent that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad put dictionaries in its passenger compartments for the benefit of crossword-addicted travellers – but unlike the first two its popularity has never faltered. Today solving crossword puzzles remains the most popular sedentary amusement in America besides watching television.

  At about the same time that crossword puzzles, ouija boards and mahjong were seizing America’s attention, baseball became known as the national pastime, though it had effectively been that for the better part of a century.

  No one knows where or when baseball was first played. It has often been suggested that the game evolved from the English children’s game rounders. Baseball and rounders do have unquestionable similarities – in both the batter hits a pitched ball and then sprints around a base path – but the difficulty is that the Oxford English Dictionary can find no citation for rounders before 1856, by which time baseball as both a sport and a name was firmly established in American life. (No one seems to have explored the possibility that rounders may in fact be derived from baseball.)

  What is certain is that baseball’s antecedents go back to well before the Mayflower. Cricket, played since the sixteenth century in England and commonly in America until the nineteenth, appears to be the grandfather of all bat and ball games, but many others followed in both Britain and America over the next two centuries – tipcat (or kitcat), bittle-battle, stick ball, one old cat, two old cat, three old cat, and base or base-ball, among others*30 All involved the same principles of striking a ball with a stick or paddle and trying to traverse a defined path before being caught or thrown out by the fielding side. The first mention of baseball is found not in America but in Britain, in a children’s book called A Pretty Little Pocket Book, Intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly, published in London in 1744.24 But ball games by this time were already well rooted in America. The first mention of a bat in the context of American play is in 1734, and there are many references throughout eighteenth-century America to ball games and their implements. The Boston Massacre, for instance, was provoked in part by someone waving a tipcat bat in a threatening manner at the British troops, and soldiers at Valley Forge are known to have passed the time in 1778 by ‘playing at base’.25

  By the early nineteenth century, ball games in America appear to have settled for the most part into a general form known as town ball, which came in two similar versions, the Massachusetts game and the New York game. The diverse etymologies of baseball terminology – innings, shortstop, outfielder and so on – indicate that the modern game arose not as an outgrowth of any particular sport but by borrowing and absorbing elements from a variety of games. The question is, who was responsible for melding these disparate elements into a unified game?

  The traditional answer is Abner Doubleday. According to David Hackett Fischer, ‘Doubleday appears to have codified one of many sets of rules before 1840.’ Fischer notes that Doubleday did not invent baseball, but, he adds, ‘neither was his association mythical, as some revisionists have suggested’.26

  In fact, it was entirely mythical.

  Responsibility for the Doubleday legend rests ultimately with Albert Goodwill Spalding, who was an outstanding ball player and an astute businessman but an undiscriminating historian. After a brief but distinguished baseball career, Spalding opened a sporting goods store in Chicago, which grew into one of the world’s largest manufacturers of sports equipment. By 1903 he was a very wealthy man and a figure of godlike authority among baseball followers.

  In that same year – the year that also saw the first modern World Series, the Wright Brothers’ first flight and the invention of the Model A car – Henry Chadwick, editor of the respected Baseball Guide, wrote a short history of the game in which he traced its probable origins to rounders and cricket. The patriotic Spalding was mortified at the thought that baseball might not be an all-American invention. After stewing over the matter for two years, in 1905 he appointed
a six-man commission to look into the question. The commission was guided by A. G. Mills, president of the National League and, it so happened, a friend for thirty years of the recently deceased Abner Doubleday. In 1907 the commission issued a report in which it stated without substantiation that the game was created by Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. When pressed for details, Mills revealed that he had heard the story from ‘a reputable gentleman’ named Albert Graves, whose word he had accepted without question. (Graves would shortly end up in a lunatic asylum.)

  To anyone who looked into the matter even slightly, it was obvious that the story didn’t hold water. For one thing, Doubleday was not at Cooperstown in 1839, but at West Point, and in any case his family had left Cooperstown in 1837. At his death, Doubleday had left sixty-seven diaries and not once in any of them did he mention baseball. Finally, if Mills’s story is to be believed, never in their thirty years of close friendship had Doubleday thought to mention to Mills that he had invented the game from which Mills was making his living.27

  In so far as baseball can be said to have a founder, it is Alexander Cartwright, a member of the New York Knickerbocker Club who in 1845 drew up a set of rules based on the form of town ball known as the New York game. In its rudiments Cartwright’s version of the game was very like that of today. It incorporated nine-player teams and an infield in the shape of a diamond with bases ninety feet apart. Three strikes made an out, and three outs concluded a team’s at-bat.