This Noble Land: My Vision for America

by James A. Michener

  The seed of this emphasis on near brutality in American life was germinated far back in colonial times, when a man’s merit was judged by his ability to stand against all opposition in his community. He must subdue the land, defend his family and himself against danger and, when challenged by the local bully, stand up and fight. Even frontier sports for amusement could be very rough. Fistfights were bare-knuckled and often fought to the complete exhaustion of one or both fighters; wrestling condoned gouging and punishing holds that would later be outlawed. The legacy of such exhibitions was a glorification of violence and the implanting of a belief that violence was a proper yardstick by which to judge a man and his games.

  But the influence of violence went beyond sports and established a norm for many aspects of American life. Political battles could be rowdy affairs and laws were apt to be draconian. In many locales the lynching of blacks became widely acceptable, and local posses often dispensed vigilante justice, including the death sentence.

  One of the most revealing measures of the influence of macho imagery in American life is the degree to which the macho vocabulary of sports has come to dominate our thinking in politics, business, recreation and general conversation. A whole new vocabulary has evolved, a kind of shorthand for conveying thought in a host of situations:

  Senator Dole delivered a knockout punch to Pat Buchanan.

  Microsoft has hit the opposition with a slam-dunk, in-your-face move.

  Both sides must have access to a level playing field.

  For the Democrats it’s always fourth down and nine to go.

  In the debate the opposition scored nine unanswered points.

  In its negotiations with the British, American Airlines is playing on a sticky wicket.

  The media and sports conduct a symbiotic affair. There is a powerful relationship between newspapers and the professional sports; television, of course, exists in large part on its endless parade of spectacular regular-season games followed by the cluster of playoffs in hockey, basketball, baseball and football. The relationship between television and football is almost mystical; one seems to have been invented to support the other. Several national magazines concentrating on sports thrive while those specializing in the arts barely survive, and those magazines emphasizing serious thought, including politics, gain only limited numbers of readers. With its pocketbook our nation has established its priorities in entertainment and popular culture: sports gain the most and the arts relatively little. At the end of each season our presidents even feel obligated to invite that year’s championship teams to the White House; our political leaders are well aware that Americans love their sports heroes above all other performers.

  We rarely give thought to the powerful influence by which sports, with its macho mentality and vocabulary, dominate many aspects of our national life. Years ago Lewis Terman, a noted psychologist who devised the first I.Q. test, made an interesting comparison between the U.S.S.R. and the United States. In the Ukrainian city of Odessa near the Black Sea, a genius in teaching the violin, Leopold Auer, operated a center that produced many notable violinists imported by the world’s symphony orchestras as their first violinists. The truly superior young men like Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, Toscha Seidel and Michel Piastro became world-class soloists. Terman went on to say that during the same period we in America instead revered sports above all else and produced champion boxers like Jess Willard and Jack Dempsey, baseball players like Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Babe Ruth. Terman accurately concluded that a nation revealed its priorities by the way it nominated its heroes.

  Another index of how our nation evaluates its citizens is to check on whom we elect to Congress. Jack Kemp was an excellent football quarterback for the Buffalo Bills who retired and ran successfully for Congress in New York. Bill Bradley was a sensational basketball player for Princeton and the New York Knicks who then easily won election and reelections to the Senate. Jim Bunning was a perfect-game pitcher for the Phillies, among others, and retired from baseball to become a U.S. congressman from Kentucky Tom McMillen was a sterling basketball player for the Atlanta Hawks and the Washington Bullets, who went on to become a congressman from Maryland. Steve Largent, a football Hall of Famer who played for the Seattle Seahawks, became a congressman from Oklahoma. Ralph Metcalfe, an Olympic sprinting champ, became a congressman from Illinois.

  In the same period, every one of the handful of writers who ran for major office was roundly rejected: William Buckley and Norman Mailer for mayor of New York; Gore Vidal in New York for the House of Representatives and in California for the U.S. Senate; and I for Congress from Pennsylvania. When I ran, the rumor which was circulated that you can’t trust writers because they’re all socialists or worse appeared to confirm the generally poor opinion about writers and all other artists. None, so far as I know, has ever won a major public office.

  A marvelous football star I knew in one of the big Western universities exemplifies an aspect of the macho attitude that pervades college athletics. I shall call him Dooby Kane, a defensive back with unbelievable skill whose college career I followed with more than usual interest. I was gratified when he was nominated for All-American, but I was less pleased over the rumors that kept reaching me, such as: ‘This guy Dooby is a world-class hell-raiser.’ I learned that the athletic department of his university kept on its payroll a lawyer whose job it was to protect the team’s football players who ran afoul of the law: ‘If Dooby gets a traffic ticket Mr. Benson’s on hand to ask the police to quash it; Dooby is needed on Saturday and mustn’t be aggravated by a silly thing like this traffic ticket.’ The athletic department’s lawyer moved in even on charges of rape and paternity cases and kept the football players free of annoyances. Dooby Kane lived in a fairy-tale meadowland in which nothing hurtful or unpleasant could touch him.

  Even though I recognized this legal service was not doing Dooby any good in the long run, and even predicted that at some later point reality would overtake him, I was nevertheless delighted when one of the top Pacific Coast teams in the National Football League made Dooby its first-round choice after his graduation. He deserved it, and I watched with a sense of ‘I told you so!’ when he made the first team and performed with his customary brilliance in the opening series of games.

  At that point I lost track of him, satisfied that he had successfully made the leap from college to the professionals, but much later, while working in Europe, I chanced to see a stateside newspaper with shocking news: Dooby Kane, on his way to being rookie of the year, had been arrested in California for the after-game rape of one of the cheerleaders. Now, however, in adult life, there was no longer a lawyer paid to shield him from trouble, connive with the legal authorities and persuade the young woman to withdraw her charges. Dooby Kane was sentenced to three years in jail, his once glorious career in tatters. The college athletic system had taught Dooby that his athletic abilities made him immune from the consequences of his actions; he learned too late that there are consequences for crimes against others and against society, even a society that worships his abilities.

  I spend much time these days studying early civilizations and pondering where it was that some made the fatal mistakes which led to their loss of leadership in their worlds; while some powers soared to great heights, others sank into obscurity. Such speculation leads inescapably to ancient Greece, about which we have a more complete documentation than we possess, for example, about Charlemagne’s medieval France.

  In ancient Greece the most powerful state was Sparta, which opted for a militaristic society in which soldiers and generals reigned supreme. In the beginning Sparta dominated the other Greek city-states; her militaristic principles were sound and effectively employed in a series of wars, invasions and realignments of power. For long stretches of Greek history it seemed as if Sparta would prevail.

  But in another part of the Greek peninsula another city founded on gentler and more thoughtful precepts was rising. In time Athens, largely
forswearing military conquest, became the home of philosophers, playwrights, historians and artistically minded rulers who sometimes resembled kings but at other times were merely outstanding private citizens who possessed an aptitude for governing.

  Gradually at first and then precipitously, mighty Sparta crumbled, its emphasis on military solutions to problems having dissipated its vitality and capacity for confronting new challenges. Sparta’s power vanished and it became a bleak reminder of a theory of government that went badly wrong. Athens, with its noble traditions of art, drama, philosophy and speculation as to what constituted good government, still thrives as a major European capital. More important, the precepts of Athens constitute one of the major illuminations of the human mind in the Western world.

  Sparta can be accurately described as a macho society, one in which the so-called manly virtues were at first extolled with impressive results but then were finally revealed for the barren philosophy they really represented. Athens was by no means a weak, effeminate counterpart to tough, masculine Sparta; it was far too rich and too varied, and too willing to speculate boldly on alternatives to its government and its society, to be so categorized. It was what might be termed a city-state in the humanist tradition—a democratic society. It did not prove that the pen is mightier than the sword; it often had to fight for its existence. But when peace was restored it returned to its philosophy and art. Sparta elected a lifestyle doomed from the start; Athens discovered an alternative, one that men and women through the centuries and around the world would seek to re-create in their nations.

  I have a strong suspicion that the United States is surrendering to a macho style of society and government. We are transforming ourselves into a modern Sparta, and if we continue careening down that path we will end in ruin. The nations in the next two hundred years that can re-create the values of Athens will survive in quiet grandeur while the new Spartas will duplicate the tragedy of the original and become arid spots on the world map.

  I have several observations to support my likening of our society to macho Sparta. Our addiction to sports is as intoxicating as it was to the Spartans and, as I’ve said, today dominates television, the daily press and social discussion. The examples I gave earlier of the proliferation of a sports vocabulary as a substitute for logical or precise thinking can be multiplied. Our excessive preoccupation with games is self-defeating in that it does not lead to thoughtful discourse, and our excessive reliance upon the sporting idiom even suggests that we have adopted the macho sporting experience as a summary of our major values. To do so cheapens the discussion of values in a moral life and lessens the options of our political leaders.

  In no other aspect of our national life is the tyranny of sports more destructive than in our educational system. I am personally deeply indebted to sports; they rescued me from years of deprivation and helped me go to colleges and universities. I attribute much of the resilient good health I enjoyed for many years to the basketball I played till age forty and the tennis that I stayed with into my early eighties. And I also am a sports fan—I would never miss the Final Four basketball championship games on the tube.

  So I do not denigrate the positive contributions of sports, but neither do I condemn lightly its negative influences. When in the town in which I used to live, boys in grades one through four are organized into peewee leagues while their sisters are still restricted to being trained to be cheerleaders, something is clearly out of balance.

  In the next grade level, five through eight, the games become far too serious, and high school coaches prowl the Friday-night contests to spot the superior fourteen-year-old athletes they can invite to attend their high schools. The chicanery of managing young athletes begins at this level and will continue till the boy is a young man of twenty-six or twenty-seven. I concede that many of the young derive, as I did, positive benefits from the experience. But I am even more aware that many more of the boys are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp; only a charmed few will achieve profitable careers with the professional teams.

  From what I’ve heard on the various campuses with which I’ve been associated, even the term ‘scholar-athlete’ has become an oxymoron; I judge that the average player entering a college or a university will have acquired by the end of his fourth year of playing for his school the equivalent of only two years of academic work at the most.

  In any number of large universities, the chancellor’s salary is a fraction of the many hundreds of thousands that the football or basketball coach earns from his salary, television appearances and advertising endorsements. This is so out of balance that no sensible observer can think it is rational.

  A very macho aspect of the average university’s athletic program is the preposterous manner in which it handles women’s athletics. I studied one school that had a student body divided exactly 50–50 between men and women, yet only $250,000 of the yearly sports budget of $4 million was allotted to women’s programs. This disproportion was justified on the basis that men’s football and basketball were ‘real’ sports that brought in large funds, while girls’ games were just that: pleasant frolics that no one took seriously. When I first wrote about this I asked: ‘Where does the administration think that babies come from?’ The health of women is certainly as important to society as the health of its young men, and I suspect that women’s health might be even more important. Even so, as a realist, in an effort to placate the coaches I would probably, if I were president of a university, approve of a budget giving men’s athletics a larger split than the women, perhaps proportionate to the revenue men bring into the university. It is true that men’s basketball and football do bring in considerable revenue and therefore deserve some accommodation.

  When our federal government enacted a law, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, requiring all colleges and universities receiving federal aid to provide their women students with athletic facilities and scholarships comparable to the men’s, the macho men who governed athletics on the various campuses devised a score of clever moves that enabled them to more or less ignore the new law. And, when they grudgingly did make some concessions, a cruelly unfair situation developed. As soon as it became clear that the women coaches of girls’ teams were going to receive substantial salaries and the administrators of the women’s divisions would receive proportionate funding, men began to appear as chairmen of the women’s programs, and younger men became coaches of the girls’ teams, especially basketball and volleyball. For many years Title IX remained ineffective, particularly after male coaches in several schools began to deride women’s programs as: ‘bikes for dykes,’ a brutally disparaging put-down.

  I must temper my remarks by explaining that I had a favorable introduction to Title IX at the University of Texas, which had enjoyed one of the most sensible and mature programs for women. Under the sage administration of Donna Lopiano, who went on to become the executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, and with the coaching brilliance of Jody Conradt, Texas fielded women’s basketball teams that went undefeated through long seasons, capturing national championships en route. I was a big supporter of those teams and those coaches, and had Title IX been as equally honored on all campuses the scandal of women athletes’ being denigrated and cheated would not have occurred. Because of Donna Lopiano’s determination to win just rights for her women, conditions are marginally better now, but the struggle goes on.

  Not only does sport dominate much of our national life, it is becoming more violent. I recall the National Football League’s sale of a videotape consisting of near-lethal collisions when three-hundred-pound tackles smashed into running backs weighing two hundred fifty. The viewer was numbed by the violence, and I later observed that the league finally stopped showing the tape; it was too brutal to represent what was supposed to be a game. In the broadcasting of sports events, however, emphasis is still given to massive collisions. The often-used shot of two rams with enormous horns smashing into each other seems to serve as a paradigm for how
humans should behave. Men’s ice hockey with its extravagant brutality (much of it staged, I suspect) is finding a growing audience and new arenas in the American South—Miami, Tampa Bay, Dallas—for its preposterous machismo. When I wrote my book on sports in America twenty years ago I refused to take either boxing or ice hockey seriously because, as I told my editor: ‘I’m pretty sure hockey with its staged brutality will fade away before long. The public will reject the gladiator approach.’ I also predicted that if basketball didn’t clean up its act it would lose customers. How wrong I was! Hockey has not only expanded into ever-widening markets but has even lured men’s basketball into putting on spurious clashes between its giant players. Ten years from now there will probably be ten more cities with hockey or basketball teams. So much for my crystal ball. America’s macho exhibitions make the bottom lines of the year-end financial reports tingle with the clink of cash. We want our sports to be violent and, as we have seen, this desire stems from a long tradition of violence in many aspects of American life. Our macho attitudes toward violence are making of us a Sparta rather than an Athens.

  While working on this segment I noted how news about three representatives of our macho society dominated TV coverage of national events. First, the O. J. Simpson trial fascinated the public. Although the majority of people reported to the pollsters that they believed him guilty, many also believed he should go free because he was, after all, a charismatic football hero. Second, the media devoted tremendous amounts of space to Duke Snider and his pleading guilty to tax fraud; the public was willing to forgive him because he was a baseball Hall of Famer. Third, the African American community of Harlem in New York City planned a gala celebration honoring the boxer Mike Tyson, and the leaders of the area eagerly volunteered not only to participate in the affair but also to lead it. Those TV messages involved a football player who was a confessed wife beater, a baseball player who was an admitted tax evader and a boxer who spent three years in jail on a rape conviction. What does the nomination of these three as American heroes and role models reveal about our value system?