The Western Tradition - Episode 46 - Fin de Siecle (1989)

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]for most people common people things were looking up there was time now for sports trips to the country even a workman could buy his own bike but for others the artistic the rich it didn't feel so good the rabble was everywhere standards were lower doom was at hand [Music] further on the western tradition [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and now ucla professor eugene weber's continuing journey through the history of western civilization in our last program we ended with a new 19th century doctrines of evolution and natural selection the survival of the fittest which were being applied to nations as well as to species for the first time national interests now demanded an improvement in the working conditions and the living conditions of the lower classes for the first time workmen were thought to have the right to enjoy culture and leisure just like their betters because it would do them good it would produce a fitter society and in england this determination produced the bank holiday act of 1871 a landmark in the emergence of modern leisure patterns because it transformed the old religious holidays into secular days of recreation sanctioned by the state and so the holy day became the holiday railway stations were packed steamboat piers were packed cheap excursion fairs cheap hotels and boarding houses all prospered because of a new phenomenon the working class holiday outside england this took more time to happen but it was a start and an example like what came to be called the english week of five and a half days it meant that in england first and in other western countries by 1900 or so the workers got more free time since there wasn't much to do with a free time much of it was spent drinking beating your wife or whatever so everybody who was anybody began to try to make sure that free time would fill with wholesome activities one of the more wholesome activities social workers thought of was playing organized games for one thing it used up energy which might otherwise explode into violence or crime for another it could remedy the physical degeneration of the people help the people to become physically fit and their morals will also improve churches schools industries all agreed that the best thing working-class boys and working-class men could do on a saturday afternoon was to play ball games the next best thing was to watch other men play ball games so through the 1870s and 80s literally thousands of teams were founded by church organizations trade unions factories railway workshops also set up teams and some of england's great football club started this way football of course meaning soccer but the greatest inspiration for sporting activities came from the schools after 1870 english towns had an educational system that drew all the local children into its net by the end of the century thousands of spectators were actually paying to see the finals of local school boy competitions they were also paying to see games being played on new grounds some with covered stands some provided by the local authorities the literacy generated in the schools laid the basis for the mass readership of new style popular newspapers that gave a lot of coverage to sports many people read newspapers just for the sports pages as they do today as the games caught on the commercial spin-offs became increasingly important sports sold papers but they also sold special equipment jerseys shorts boots and tonics to strengthen the players and embrocations for sore muscles and patent medicines to heal them and bear to console them but interest in sports reached further than that the post and telegraph were crucial for setting up national schedules and to bring the news of game results train and tram were essential for moving large numbers of fans to parts of their own city where they had never been before let alone to other towns where they went to support their team accessible tram lines for working people helped them get to work but also to the stadium cheap railway fares for special occasions which had been used to get people to exhibitions or to pilgrimage shrines were now allowed for cup finals which drew over a hundred thousand by 1901 as well as for weekend travel so the lower reaches of the population were being freed and being encouraged to enjoy the first benefits of a technically advanced society leisure time more money improvements in education transport communications produce the need the desire and the possibility for leisure and recreation and the process was not unique to britain it could be seen in other societies like australia and the united states where mass recreation became a feature of late 19th century life most of the time games radiated out from britain soldiers and colonial administrators carried cricket throughout the british empire and it's interesting to see sailors and businessmen and mechanics carrying soccer throughout europe and overseas by the 1880s and 90s soccer was being played in austria and russia and turkey and scandinavia and all over latin america there was also rugby which was played by students rugby was more complicated than soccer and harder to play without getting dirty so it wasn't as popular it was more of an upper-class game the great english private schools played rugby oxford and cambridge played it american football also started in the universities which formulated the first intercollegiate rules in 1873.

[00:08:45]the game they played was pretty close to rugby but in the 1880s it evolved into what we now play and watch as american football although even more violent during the 1905 season for example college games produced 18 deaths and 159 major injuries perhaps that's what attracted mounting attendants with hundreds of thousands flocking into new stadiums to watch college athletes maim each other [Music] baseball was less bloody but just as popular after the civil war when it was codified and became an adult game by the 1890s baseball players had organized and were negotiating salaries and transfers baseball was being exported to cuba and central america and gamblers and sporting goods manufacturers were making good money from it [Music] by that time also the only sport of strictly american origin had been born in 1891 at the ymca in springfield massachusetts where a gym instructor invented basketball to relieve the boredom of gym classes within a few years basketball was being played all over the world as well as in american colleges and it was even played by women it was the example of english and american college sports that fired the frenchman baron charles kuberte to revive the ancient olympic games as an inspiration for moral and physical revival and for international amity the first olympic games of the modern age would take place in athens in 1896 and american athletes did very well there i don't propose to give you a history of modern sports in this program but i do want to make the point that social political and economic history come together in sports as in everything else the emancipation of the masses the improvement in their living and working conditions the public concern for public health and national integration the profits to be made out of all this none of these can be separated you can see this even better if you look at the fortunes of the bicycle which was one of the most consequential inventions of the 19th century bike-like contraptions existed at the time of the french revolution but velocipedes turned into modern machines in the 1880s and that's when they became tremendously popular early bicycles were expensive so cycling was an upper-class and middle-class sport but women could cycle as well as men and the bike was a great emancipating agent for women because it freed them from chaperones and especially because it began to free them from corsets and cumbersome skirts and put them in trousers for the first time early feminists who were already interested in more rational dress for women appreciated the bicycle and toasted it as a liberator then as more people bought bikes prices came down and more people could afford to buy bikes cyclo tourism developed cycling clubs holidays on wheels [Music] the growing number of cyclists on the roads led to demand for better road surfaces in the country as well as in town hotels and inns and roadside cafes developed or improved to cater to these new customers and a whole industry group manufacturers who wanted to show that their model was the best developed bicycle racing both in velodromes and in road races which drew tens of thousands of spectators cycle racing inspired some of the liveliest heart of the 19th century and it also provided as soccer did in english-speaking countries an avenue for social promotion champion racers were the first national and international sports stars [Music] the cycle manufacturers were often people who had started out making umbrella spokes and corset stays and then converted to something more exciting using similar components and the same spirit of enterprise inspired a lot of them to try to put engines between three or four wheels and to turn out first horseless carriages which they called automobiles things that move by themselves [Music] and then the first airplanes if you look at the wheels and the bodies of the first planes and cars you will see that a lot of basic components were the same and the number of cycle racers like the farm and brothers passed from racing bikes to racing cars to racing planes moved by the same spirit as the men who made them a love of speed of adventure of change characteristic of the age but the most important thing about the bicycle was that it represented the first mechanical contraption that could match the horse and which didn't eat hay or foul the streets or need a stable the bike allowed men to go faster than a horse it gave a lot of people a mobility and freedom that only very few enjoyed until then [Music] by the eve of the first world war miners skilled workmen baker boys could afford to buy their own bike and more could realistically dream of owning one eventually that's the sort of revolution i like but not everybody felt so enthusiastic about technological change because it disturbed established habits the telephone for example was seen as an intrusion on privacy when the painter degas was called to the telephone during dinner one of his guests laughed at him so that's the telephone someone rings and you run just like a servant would do and when in a few years subscribers became so numerous that they couldn't be listed and called up by name they were given telephone numbers and this was resented and denounced as depersonalizing you might be losing your identity a lot of people from the upper classes felt that they were losing their identity in the new mass identity of the 1880s and 90s [Music] the holidays they used to spend among themselves in some spa or seaside resort were being threatened they thought by vulgar crowds with loud voices and flashy clothes the shopping they used to do in comfort was now hemmed in by a lot of crude women who had used public transport to get there the higher education and the better jobs that went with higher education were even becoming available to a few school boys from the lower classes who might aspire to marry your daughter or your sister everybody dressed like everybody else they didn't really of course but that's how the upper class is felt so how could you expect respect let alone the deference due from inferiors to superiors [Music] let alone respect for women who now worked in increasing numbers who wore bloomers who flirted who probably used contraceptive methods to limit the number of their children who could respect such women even political power political influence were being disputed by paraveneers who were not gentlemen but professional politicians goodness knows they might even be labor leaders [Music] so the world was going to the dogs it was full of degenerates it was full of pushy part of the news it was decadent democracy was decadent if these degenerates weren't regenerated society would sink under the weight of their rottenness and corruption so let's clean them out first anti-semitism will clean out the jews and put them in their place then let's sweep out other foreign bodies foreign from catholic countries catholics from protestant countries and so on let's purify the community let's use eugenics which proposes a science for breeding fine human beings [Music] and let's revivify national enthusiasm and focus it on the struggle for life against our neighbors against our enemies who will dominate us if we don't dominate them that is nationalism and while we are at it let's defuse the working-class agitation let's transcend the idea of class warfare by joining the two great forces of the age nationalism and socialism in which the state possesses the means of production as well as the means of government let's combine these two great forces in a new more powerful ideology called national socialism as you know this was an idea with a great future and a bloody one but for the moment socialism and nationalism were going to advance separately but each affected the other the national state became increasingly interventionist increasingly social the major agency for redistributing the wealth of its citizens taking from the rich and giving to the poor and although the socialists continue to talk internationalism and class war they became increasingly patriotic increasingly attached to the reformist state in 1914 the workers went to war as enthusiastically as everybody else and the socialist parties dedicated to peace voted for war credits along with everybody else in part because they were patriotic in part because their nationalism persuaded them that the workers interests were better served by defending their own country against enemies whose social politics would be more backward more reactionary this was one set of reactions to the turbulent times do something political or ideological but one man's progress is another man's perversion and the integration of some looked and fell to others like debasement decadence vulgarization so another significant reaction was to escape to drop out to affirm your difference from the rabble to show that you were more sophisticated more cultivated more sensitive than the heavy lumpish unleavened masses and this was a very influential reaction it affected most of the arts and letters of the time and it introduced the era of the avant-garde in which the virtue is not so much in what you do as in being ahead of what others do a new conformism whose chief characteristic is that it tries to avoid conformity it was important to write or paint or sing in a way that wouldn't be appreciated by insensitive barbarians but only by initiates by aesthetes by refined pallets and fine minds capable of appreciating rare and refined sensations tastes shapes illusions truly exceptional men and women appreciated only the exceptional ordinary living as one of them said was not for them our servants will do that for us [Music] the ideal now was music without melody paintings without a shape that might be immediately clear to the beholder poetry without rhyme novels without a plot philosophies that communicated a wisdom for the chosen few in the long run this was going to divorce artists and intellectuals from the general public and establish the present principle that either you are a real artist condemned to exile in the midst of insensitive masses or else you make your work comprehensible and accessible which is a form of prostitution all this is now old stuff but it wasn't in the 19th century when all the great painters and writers were also very popular [Music] in the short run this tendency to set oneself apart artistically fitted the new tempo of the age the interest in novelty and change it also went with a propensity for non-conformity drugs homosexuality transvestism occultism mysticism all of which were used mainly to demonstrate that you were not as others were the publicity that such activities attracted confirmed the prophets of doom that yes they were living in an age of decades and the doomsters reactions confirmed the estates that they were living in an age of barbarism so the paradoxical situation in the 20 years or so before 1914 was that life was getting better for everybody materially but that the most artistic and sensitive were convinced that life was getting worse and this also was going to become a familiar experience a familiar phenomenon of the 20th century for some reason the end of the 19th century struck a lot of people as if it was the end of the world they spoke of these years as the third siekler the end of the century and nobody had taken the end of a century so tragically since the coming of the year 1000 when they really expected the end of the world now looking back now it all seems rather silly but in the end 1914 really was the end of one world the end of a way of life and the beginning of another more popular more democratic more mass oriented so both the ends and the beginnings were to be found in this era and we shouldn't be surprised that people were confused contradictory mixed up just as we are today next time the war to end all wars [Music] you