The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play

by Frank Andre Guridy

After the new Garden opened, Rickard sought to build a chain of “Madison Square Gardens” in various cities. The first such facility was the Boston Garden, which had an almost identical design as that of the Eighth Avenue Garden. Originally called “Boston Madison Square Garden,”

Soon after the game, arena workers prepared the Garden for its next event. As they had done many times before, they melted the ice, disassembled the rink, and stored it beneath the main floor. Then they arranged the arena for a meeting-hall-style affair, setting out rows of folding chairs and a stage on the arena floor. But precisely who did the work of refashioning the Garden into a Nazi meeting hall is not altogether clear. It is likely that members of the Bund assisted the arena’s staff. What is certain is that the decorations made the meeting’s intent abundantly clear. As attendees entered the arena, they could not miss the gigantic portrait of George Washington hanging behind the stage. On each side of Washington were large flags of the United States, both the Betsy Ross thirteen-star flag and the modern version with forty-eight stars (Hawaii and Alaska had not yet been admitted into the Union). Interspersed with the American flags were the flags of the German American Bund, which included the ubiquitous swastika. Hanging from the balcony were two large signs: read america’s fearless press: the free american!, which was a reference to a Bund publication, and another that read stop jewish domination of christian americans!

For a little more than three hours, Bund leaders from around the country made their case for the indispensability of Nazism to “free America” from the damage done to it by Jews. J. Wheeler-Hill, the Bund’s national secretary, recited a litany of problems facing the nation. His list reads like a timeless list of reactionary gripes that could be rehearsed in 1939 or 2023. Wheeler-Hill identified “the spread of radicalism with its inspired class hatred, racial sectionalism, political abuses”; the “moral erosion and subsequent disintegration of our national unity”; massive unemployment and the “stupendous total of our national public debt,” among other calamities plaguing the United States.

Legalized and customary racial segregation went hand in hand with commercialization. Four of the five major bowl-game classics were hosted by cities in the Jim Crow South: Dallas, El Paso, New Orleans, and Miami, which heightened southern influence on the business of college football. If immigrant working-class politics shaped the culture of northern arenas like Madison Square Garden, in the Jim Crow South, the stadium became a major theater for staging the South’s commitment to white supremacy.

Stadiums make possible the spectacular staging of a society’s ideologies and self-perceptions. In the 1920s, the college football stadium became an increasingly popular venue to display such aspirations. In this period, college football and Major League Baseball were surging in popularity. College football’s rise to prominence convinced universities across the country to invest in building stadiums. Fans and alumni of these schools partnered with athletic departments to defeat faculty and administrators who believed that football’s crass commercialism had no place at institutions of higher learning.

By the late 1940s, the association was printing tickets explicitly designated for persons of the “Caucasian Race.”29 These stipulations were bitter pills for black fans to swallow, which inevitably led them to look askance at the annual Sugar Bowl festivities and to focus on developing their own sporting competitions.

In subsequent years, the Washington franchise remained obstinate in the face of growing criticism of Native mascotry, but eventually some Washington supporters began to question the allegiance to the team’s odious tradition. At a pep rally for the Washington pro football team at Union Station in January 2000, journalist Courtland Milloy was unnerved by the scene he witnessed: “One of the things I’ve always liked about having a winning football team is how it brings our community together,” he wrote. “We could all root—black, white, whatever—for our side. Nothing like a common enemy—say, the Dallas Cowboys—to make us forget our differences. But even this relatively harmless bit of fantasy is no longer possible for me, not after seeing how hurtful the pep rally at Union Station was for [Suzan] Harjo.” Milloy’s reflection came as he watched Zema “Chief Zee” Williams obliviously asking Harjo if she was having a good time at the rally as the Redskins Band blared a “Hollywood version of Indians-on-the-warpath music.” Harjo, a Native American activist, grimaced and later characterized Williams as a “black man [who] gets paid to put on an Indian outfit and tap-dance for the white man.”41 Milloy’s article reveals the ways even longtime football fans began to see the cruelty of a community coming together around a phenomenon that celebrated the degradation of Native peoples. Native activism was finally moving the needle on the question of Indian mascots and logos.

Madeline Blais, a recently hired reporter for the Boston Herald. Both encountered frosty receptions from the Red Sox public relations staff and players. Team officials tried to dissuade them from interviewing players on the field and in the dugout. When Shah met with Bill Crowley, the team’s public relations person and gatekeeper of the press box, he informed the young sportswriter: “I’m not sure what your legal status is, but around here we don’t let women into the press box. Or onto the field. Or into the dugout.” Shah pressed on, yet Crowley refused. “I had become increasingly annoyed with Major League Baseball’s attitude toward women,” she recalled years later. “Back then we were lured to the ballpark with pantyhose giveaways and half-price tickets.” Teams had treated women as sideshows. “In Philadelphia, they could roam the stands in cute little miniskirts as ushers. In Baltimore, they could rush onto the field between innings to sweep off the bases… those were baseball’s concessions to women.” After she threatened to sue, the team and the local baseball writers had a change of heart and grudgingly granted her permission to enter the press areas of the ballpark.30

Meanwhile, Blais received similar treatment, as she reported in her article published the next day: If any one group has to be educated about female sportswriters it’s the male reporters themselves. They sit in the press gallery with their cigars invariably poking out of their mouths, wearing hats and saying: You’re ruining our racket.31 This hit the nail on the head. The women who began to arrive in larger numbers discovered that the white men who controlled these corners of the ballpark—and, therefore, sports journalism—had been running a racket for years. Men weren’t occupying these positions because they were smarter or because sports were too complicated for women to comprehend. They controlled the sportswriter domain because they had decided that this was a realm of society that they were entitled to dominate. As the number of women sportswriters gradually increased, the truth about sportswriting was exposed.

The most noteworthy aspect of the Kings’ arrival in Sacramento was not the move itself but the name of the team’s new arena. The new building was not named after the team or in honor of local veterans. Instead, it was named after a corporation. Lukenbill had hatched an agreement with the Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO), one of the biggest oil companies on the West Coast. On August 26, 1985, the company signed a ten-year $7 million contract for the naming rights to the new arena. It would be known as ARCO Arena.

As the sportswriter and critic Howard Bryant has written: “Not only did America seem to be in lockstep in honoring the military, but the cultural pressure against dissent was so strong, opponents didn’t dare speak out against fifty thousand flag-wavers.” Kaepernick was but one of an increasing number of athletes who had enough of fifteen years of blind obedience to a state of perpetual war. Enough with the elevation of the police to the status of military heroes, a conflation that was a legacy of 9/11.