YMHAs and athletic competition, by Arieh Sclar

In the 1910s, both the YMHA League and its member institutions banned Saturday play, which indicated that officials believed Jewish athletic culture could function adequately on a six-day athletic week.  Some young Jews found the official separation of Jewish athleticism from mainstream sport unsatisfactory.  In a July 1915 letter to physical director George Schoening, 92^nd Street YMHA President Felix Warburg explained that a few members had ingeniously “formed themselves into the so-called Manhattan Club, making it appear by using the cut of our building, that the same was their club-house.”  They did this in order to “play in competition on Saturdays, which the Board had ruled should not be permitted.”[1]

Writing on behalf of the Board of Directors, Warburg communicated their concerns regarding “the attitude of our young men toward athletics.”  Besides the Sabbath incident, which officials never fully confronted in either private meetings or public declarations, he spelled out two other matters that needed to be addressed, gambling and professionalism.  Competition could be a healthy activity for “our young men, handicapped as a good many of them are by generations of ancestors who have been forced to live in unhealthy surrounding and crowded districts.”  The YMHA needed to refocus its efforts toward fair play and sportsmanship since “the desire to excel and to win prizes has led us to give an undue importance to those young men who may turn out to be the winners.”  Placing blame squarely on themselves, YMHA directors and officials “feel that we may have been guilty of driving them forward in these ambitions, rather than warning them to improve their standing all around and thus causing them to specialize to a dangerous degree to the detriment to other boys, whom they have crowded out.”  Warburg appealed to Schoening to teach and develop “the ethics of sport…rather than the muscles alone.”[2]

The Bulletin’s 1907 call for champions had not foreseen that problems would arise.  It assumed competitive sport would be easily incorporated into American Jewish culture.  Aggressive behavior, whether associated with professionalism, gambling, or disregard of Jewish tradition, illustrated that YMHA members had learned ‘American’ values, but potentially at the expense of ‘Jewish’ values.  Individualism and the pursuit of financial success were not the values Association officials sought to teach its “young men.”  The YMHA’s desire to develop strong and modern American Jewish men meant that Saturday competition would not be tolerated.  Neither would disreputable behavior that transgressed middle class norms.

When confronted with the consequences of competitive sport, YMHA officials became determined to reign in their champions.  The hierarchical structure of the YMHA League encouraged specialization and competition, which meant officials confronted the ultimate paradigm of American sport, elite or mass participation.  Yet, Warburg’s reference to Jews’ ghetto existence indicated that an additional burden influenced his perspective.  The perceived absence of sport in Jewish culture meant that despite concerns regarding the YMHA’s developing athletic culture, neither Warburg nor other YMHA officials ever contemplated abolishing competitive sport.[3]

In 1917, the YMHA formed an official Athletic Committee to replace an informal committee that possessed no authority to control members’ actions since it focused solely on financial matters.[4]  Both directors and members governed the new Committee.  Indeed, the first official committee to include members, it sought to protect the YMHA’s growing reputation in mainstream sport.  New YMHA President Irving Lehman placed the responsibility for developing “clean” sports in the hands of the members.  At the committee’s opening meeting, Lehman stated: “This is an experiment.  If this experiment fails it hurts the kind of work in which you are especially interested…pick out the kind of men [Committee members] who are going to stand for straight, clean athletics.”[5]

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[1] Felix Warburg to George Schoening, July 26, 1915, Young Men’s Hebrew Association records, 92^nd Street Y Archives, New York.

[2] Ibid. Warburg’s concerns regarding gambling had been caused by betting at various events, but specifically at baseball games.  The league cancelled the baseball season.

[3] The incident appears to have resulted solely in a Bulletin article that praised YMHA athletes for not competing on the Sabbath. The article was written by a member of the Board of Directors, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Schulman. See “The Opportunities for the Jewish Character,” Y Bulletin, May 1916.   Athletes guilty of gambling and professionalism were briefly suspended.

[4] An example of praise awarded on the basketball team is found in the 1917 YMHA Annual Report, which proudly reported the 32-1 record of the team.  The following year, the Bulletin editor and physical director picked an All-YMHA team from ‘in-house’ teams.  The existence of this all-star team is the best indication of a shifting ideology toward basketball as honored players were chosen solely for ‘playing ability,’ and ‘points scored,’ with no mention of sportsmanship, moral value, or other Progressive ideals.  On the formation of the initial committee in 1913, see “Committee on Athletics,” Y Bulletin, April 1913.

[5] For Lehman’s speech, see “Athletic Committee Re-Organized,” Y Bulletin, April 1917. Felix Warburg resigned as YMHA president in April 1916.  The Athletic Committee was the first committee at the Association to contain members.