There were all types of tricycles: the Surprise Tricycle, the Quadrant Tricycle, the Coventry Rotary Tricycle

Tricycles were not scorned by men. They were sometimes as fast as the bicycle (the mile record was 2:33 minutes for the tricycle, 2:29 minutes for the bicycle in 1890), 47 and a day's run in the country could be managed with a good deal more ease. Professor Hoffman Tips to Tricyclists was written for both the sexes. It was an all-inclusive guide, with advice on the wearing of celluloid collars and on management of breath, on cleaning the machine and on the desirability of lady cyclists' carrying menthol cones for emergencies.

There were all types of tricycles -- the Surprise Tricycle, the Quadrant Tricycle, the Coventry Rotary Tricycle. Another vehicle was the Sociable. It was in effect a small self-wheeled carriage, the cyclists happily sitting beside each other. It was widely advertised for honeymoons. Other machines completely defy description -- the Coventry Convertible Four in Hand and the Rudge Triplet Quadricycle.

The social consequences of bicycling, to be so much more apparent in the next decade, were already becoming evident in the 1880's. Although the price of machines ($100 to $125 for an ordinary and $180 for a tricycle) still made them an expensive luxury, the number of cyclists was increasing year by year. The rediscovery of the outdoors had received its greatest encouragement, and the League of American Wheelmen was performing heroic services in demanding improved roads. "Bicycling is a fraternity of more permanent organization," Outing declared in 1882, "than ever characterized any sport since the world began."

The role of the colleges in the rise of sports was not one of leadership. It was not their example that first set people playing games, bicycling, or generally getting outdoors for recreation. The epidemics sweeping the country did not pass them by, but undergraduates neither introduced nor popularized any one of the games that have so far been described. The only sport they developed was intercollegiate football.

It descended from a game played in England at least as early as the days of Edward II. "For as much as there is great noise in the city," reads a decree of 1314, "caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils arise which God forbid; we forbid such game to be used in the city in the future." And again and again in later years England's sovereigns fruitlessly legislated against a sport which the common people insisted on playing. The early colonists brought it to this country, and throughout the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries it was popular in the colleges. The game generally played in this period was something like association football, or soccer, but it was completely unorganized, and any number of players was usually allowed on each side. The first recorded intercollegiate contests (there is notice of an earlier game between two groups of Boston schoolboys), took place in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers. They played three games with twenty-five men on each team.

A revival of football at Harvard and Yale about 1872 (it had been prohibited for some years because of increasing roughness) was the first real step in its emergence as an organized sport. The English variant known as Rugby, rather than association football, was played, and at a conference among representatives of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia a set of rules derived from those of the English Rugby Union was formally adopted. If the game was still far removed from the intercollegiate football we know today, its development from that date, 1876, followed a steady and persistent course.

Among the early changes which transformed Rugby into our modern game were the reduction of the number of players from fifteen to eleven; their assignment to specific positions in line and backfield; new provisions for running with the ball, kicking, and passing; and the substitution of the modern "scrimmage" for the old "scrummage" -- that confused huddle of the original game in which, instead of being passed back, the ball was indiscriminately kicked out after being put in play. When the new Intercollegiate Football Association gave its sanction to these new rules in 1881, there was little left of English Rugby in American colleges.

Football aroused spectator interest from the start, and the Big Three of the eastern colleges -- Harvard, Yale and Princeton -- at first completely overshadowed all other teams. It was long before comparable elevens were in the field. The Thanksgiving Day games of these universities were consequently the great events of the fall season. Some four thousand spectators turned out for the first Princeton-Yale game in 1878; little more than a decade later, attendance was almost forty thousand.

Few adults found themselves able or willing to play football. Although teams made up of former college players were for a time quite active, the game was primarily for boys. But many were glad to watch so exciting a sport. Its dependence upon brute force satisfied atavistic instincts as could no other modern spectacle except the prize-fight. Baseball had become the national game because so many people played it as well as watched it. Football was destined from the first to be primarily a spectator sport.

This phenomenal expansion in the field of sports was the most significant development in the nation's recreational life that had yet taken place. Apart from all the considerations already mentioned, athletics provided an outlet for surplus energy and suppressed emotions which the American people greatly needed. The traditions of pioneer life had influenced them along very definite lines, and the restrictions of urban living warred against a feeling for the outdoors which was in their blood. With the gradual passing of so much of what the frontier had always stood for, sports provided a new outlet for an inherently restless people.

In subsequent years they were to become far more general. Outdoor recreation was to develop into a much more marked feature of American life as new opportunities opened up for ever larger numbers of people to play games. The democracy was to take over sport to an extent which its limited leisure and lack of resources still made impossible in these decades after the Civil War. But the path had been cleared. America had discovered a new world.

Sports history: roller skates, bicycling

Roller-skating had been introduced by James L. Plimpton in 1863, and New York's social leaders, hoping it could be restricted to "the educated and refined classes," quickly made it fashionable. Their Roller Skating Association leased the Atlantic House in Newport and made over its dining-hall and piazza into a skatingrink. It held weekly assemblies where such distinguished guests as General Sherman and Chief Justice Bigelow watched "tastefully dressed young men and girls, sailing, swimming, floating through the mazes of the march, as if impelled by magic power."

But Newport soon had to surrender to the democracy. Rinks were built in every town and immense ones established in the cities, with a general admission of fifty or twenty-five cents, which welcomed all comers. In Chicago the Casino accommodated four thousand persons -- three thousand spectators and one thousand skaters. There were not only dancing and racing. Professor A. E. Smith introduced special fancy skating -- the Richmond Roll, the Picket Fence, the Philadelphia Twist ("rolling his limbs far apart and laying his head sideways on one of them"), and the Dude on Wheels. Night after night the band played, the new Siemens lights shone down on the hard-maple floor, and a vast attendance crowded the Casino's spacious and elegant rink.

Going further west, skating was even more popular. The Olympian Club Roller Skating Rink in San Francisco advertised five thousand pairs of skates and 69,000 square feet of hardmaple floor. It was holding races, roller-skating polo, and "tall hat and high collar" parties.

Young and old skated -- men, women, and children. For a time no other sport seemed able to match its popularity. A writer in Harper's Weekly cited a gravestone inscription:

Our Jane has climbed the golden stair And passed the jasper gates; Henceforth she will have wings to wear, Instead of roller skates.

But ia remained for bicycling to become the most spectacular craze of all. While it had had a brief vogue in the 1860's (the first velocipedes -- the French "dandy horses" -- were known as early as the opening of the century), it was the introduction about 1876 of the high-wheeled bicycles, supplanting the old wooden boneshakers, that first made it a popular sport. Within half a dozen years of the first manufacture of the new wheels, there were some twenty thousand confirmed cyclists in the country; in 1886 the total had swelled to some fifty thousand, and a year later it was over a hundred thousand. Clubs were organized in almost every town and city throughout the land, and to bring together organizations of like interest and promote cycling as a sport, they banded together, in 1881, to form the League of American Wheelmen.

"There has been heretofore in our American life, crowded to excess as it has been with the harassing cares and anxieties of business," a writer in Harper's Monthly Magazine stated in July, 1881, "so little attention paid to the organized practice of healthgiving outdoor exercise, to which bicycling is peculiarly adopted, that the organization of this League of American Wheelmen can not fail to be recognized as an important subject for public congratulation."

The safety bicycle and the drop frame for women were still almost a decade away. This was the first enthusiasm of the high-wheeled pioneers, those daring riders who went forth perched on a postage-stamp saddle athwart a sixty-inch wheel. A header from that dizzy eminence meant broken bones, if not a broken head. But forth the wheelmen rode -- high-necked jackets, close-fitting knee-pants, and little round hats (later, ventilated duck helmets and imported English hose) -- prepared to defy all the hazards of the road. They generally went in company. Club runs were the fashion. The cyclists mounted to the bugle call of "Boots and Saddles," and sober pedestrians watched in awe as they wheeled past in military formation.

It was also the era of impressive bicycle parades, competitive club drills, hill-climbing contests, and race meetings. On July 4, 1884, news of the bicycle world included a meet on the Boston Common drawing thousands of spectators; a parade of seventy cyclists at Portsmouth, New Hampshire; the first club run of the Kishwaukee Bicycle Club at Syracuse, Illinois; races for the Georgia championship at Columbus; and medal runs at Salt Lake City. Thomas Stevens was off on his famous bicycle trip around the world, and in New York a bicycle school with thirty uniformed instructors was teaching Wall Street bankers to wheel to band music.

The rôle of women in this bright dawn of the bicycle age was limited but none the less well recognized. The high-wheeled machine was too much for them, but they were given the tricycle. Here was recreation on "a higher plane than the ball-field or the walking rink," an outdoor activity which marked "a step towards the emancipation of woman from her usually too inactive indoor life." In this vigorous propaganda to promote female cycling, The Wheelman also called upon the support of ministers and physicians. Bicycling was both godly and healthy. One word of warning, from A Family Physician: "Do not think of sitting down to table until you have changed your underclothing, and, after a delightful wash and rub-down, quietly and leisurely dressed again."

Sports History: Croquet, Archery and lawn tennis

Croquet had in the meantime performed the miracle of getting both men and women out-of-doors for an activity they could enjoy together. The first of the post-war games to be introduced from England, it reached an even broader public than baseball. Croquet was more than a game; it was a social function. Contemporary writers were soon pointing out what an unmixed blessing it was for the American damsel, and warning bachelors to beware.

" 'Charming' is the universal exclamation of all who play or who watch the playing of Croquet . . . ," an early rules book stated. "Hitherto, while men and boys have had their healthy means of recreation in the open air, the women and girls have been restricted to the less exhilarating sports of indoor life. . . . Grace in holding and using the mallet, easy and pleasing attitudes in playing, promptness in taking your turn, and gentlemanly and ladylike manners generally throughout the game, are points which it is unnecessary for us to enlarge on. . . . Young ladies are proverbially fond of cheating at this game; but they only do so because they think that men like it."

George Makepeace Towle had an idyllic picture of people playing croquet: "The sunshine glimmering through the branches -- the soft velvety grass -- the cool, pure country air -- the quiet broken only by the twittering of the birds, and now and then a passing footstep." Only occasionally did some controversial issue arise to mar the sweet felicity of the croquet court. There was the problem of "spooning." This was not a mode of behavior, but the practice of hitting the croquet-ball by what is now called the pendulum stroke. Obviously women in hooped-skirts were at a disadvantage. The Nation gave its considered opinion: "We agree that spooning is perfectly fair in a match of gentlemen, but it is decidedly ungenerous when played with ladies, unless those ladies are bloomers."

Croquet was by no means confined to the fashionable lawns of the effete East, however. It went west with the homesteaders. Many accounts tell of its popularity in the small towns of the prairie states. So great was the vogue in the 1870's that manufacturers put out playing sets with candle-sockets on the wickets for night playing.

Archery and lawn tennis, the former the revival of an old sport and the latter newly introduced from England about 1874, had also been taken up widely by this time. They too were sports, gentle and genteel, which could be played by both sexes. "The contestants were ladies and gentlemen from the cultured circles of society," Harper's Weekly reported of an archery tournament in the White Stocking Park at Chicago in 1879, "and while the rivalry among the shooters was keen to the last degree, an air of such refinement and courteous dignity as is not often witnessed by observers of public games characterized every one connected with the contest." riting on tennis in 1881, the magazine Outing, whose establishment reflected the rising interest in sports, assured its feminine readers that this was far too refined a game to offer any attractions for the lower orders of society. A lady who took part in a tennis match would find herself "in the company of persons in whose society she is accustomed to move."

At this stage of its development, lawn tennis as played in the United States did not involve hard, overhand serves, back-court drives, or smashes at the net. Women players suffered only the slightest handicap in having to hold up the trains of their long, dragging skirts; they were not expected actually to run for the ball. It was patted gently back and forth over a high net stretched across any level space of lawn. Competition gradually led to changed methods of play, and with the organization of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association (there were forty member clubs in 1883) and the institution of annual tournaments at Newport, men began to take the game more seriously. The active features of play that now characterize it were developed. A group of players whose names are still remembered emerged from the ranks -- R. D. Sears, James Dwight, Robert D. Wrenn, William A. Larned, Dwight F. Davis. . . . Finally in 1900 the establishment of the International Davis Cup matches definitely marked the transformation of tennis from a pastime to a sport.

Baseball slowly spread north, south, east, and west

One of the first clubs that brought a more democratic spirit into the baseball world was the Eckford Club of Brooklyn, formed in 1855. By this year the Knickerbockers had many rivals in and about New York. Games were being placed regularly among such teams as the Gothams, the Putnams, the Harlems, the Excelsiors, and the Eagles. But the Eckford Club had this distinction: its members were shipwrights and mechanics. They suffered the disadvantage in comparison with other clubs of not having very much time to practise, but they soon proved their worth by defeating the Excelsior Club, made up of merchants and clerks. The Newark Mechanics Club was among other organizations composed of workingmen, while one of the best teams playing on the Boston Common, where games were often scheduled at five in the morning so as not to interfere with the players' work, was made up of truckmen. And then in 1856 a young man named Henry Wright, employed in a jewelry manufactory and also a professional bowler with the St. George Cricket Club, joined the Knickerbockers. Social barriers were breaking down completely. The ball clubs wanted to win their games. Here also was a hint of the professionalism toward which they were headed. Another decade and Wright will have gone to Cincinnati to organize the Red Stockings as the country's first admittedly professional team.

Baseball slowly spread north, south, east, and west. It drove out town-ball in New England and cricket in Philadelphia, made its way to the Mississippi Valley ( Chicago had four clubs in 1858), crossed the trans-Mississippi frontier, reached out to the Pacific Coast. Everywhere it was bringing men and boys into active outdoor play. It was also becoming highly organized. The National Association of Base Ball Players was formed in 1858, with twenty-five clubs applying for charter membership, and two years later delegates from fifty organizations attended its annual meeting. New York and New Jersey led in the number of clubs ( New England had a separate association for teams still playing town-ball), but Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, and New Orleans were but a few among the cities where baseball was now established.

The game was attracting spectators as well as players, and a wider public interest was growing out of the reports carried in the newspaper of the interclub matches. It still had features strange to modern times. A man was out on a ball caught on the first bounce; pitching was an underhand throw. Even though there were players who "sent the ball with exceeding velocity," the scales were more heavily weighted in favor of the batter than they are to-day. No gloves were worn. We find The Spirit of the Times praising Mr. Wadsworth of the Knickerbockers for his fearlessness "in the dangerous position of catcher." Contemporary prints portray the umpire sitting out in the field somewhere near first base under an umbrella, in frock-coat and stove-pipe hat.

But baseball was exciting. In 1858 some two thousand persons actually paid fifty cents admission for a match at the Fashion Race Course, the first recorded game with gate receipts. Two years later the champion Excelsiors, of Brooklyn, went on tour and defeated challenging clubs in cities throughout New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Returning for a match with another Brooklyn team, the Atlantics, they played a game which drew fifteen thousand spectators. Baseball was on its way.

The Civil War interrupted this forward march, but it brought an even larger popular following. The game was everywhere played behind the lines and in base camps, almost on the battlefield. Country boys and factory-workers were introduced to the new sport, and with the end of the war they took it back to their home communities. One result of wartime playing is seen in the attendance of clubs at the first post-war meetings of the National Association. The total jumped to ninety-one in 1865. A year later the membership, representing seventeen states and the District of Columbia, totaled 202. "Since the war, it has run like wildfire," the Galaxy declared editorially. Charles A. Peverelly believed it to be beyond question "the leading feature in the outdoor sports of the United States." And by 1872 the magazine Sports and Games categorically stated that it had become "the national game of the United States."

The American genius for organization was outdoing itself in the growth of the National Association, however, and the keen rivalry among member clubs was promoting professionalism. The practice developed of engaging expert players for a local club through offering them better-paid jobs in the community than they could normally expect to obtain. On occasion players were directly paid for their services in important games. A confusing quasi-professionalism invaded the ranks of what had formerly been a wholly amateur sport. The next step was inevitable. In 1869 the Cincinnati Red Stockings were definitely hired as a professional team for a country-wide tour. They did not lose a game that summer, and the practical advantage of salaried players was recognized by all those sports followers primarily interested in championship teams.

These moves toward professional baseball were both cause and consequence of the heavy betting that began to be made on interclub games. For the gambling fraternity quickly became interested in the new sport. It was taken up as professional footraces and prize-fighting had been. Charges also began to be made that the gamblers were not only beginning to control the ball players, but were operating pools and arranging for games to be won or lost on a strictly business basis. Amateur members of the National Association bitterly contested the increasing influence of these new elements in the game, but their organization was losing its control. In 1871 its place was taken by a new association frankly composed of professional players.

For a time this association did not function very effectively. It was either unwilling or unable to suppress gambling, and baseball fell under a cloud of popular disapproval. Efforts at reform were finally crowned when five years later William A. Hulbert undertook the organization of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. Rules and regulations were now adopted which set up strict standards for inter-club competition. With an original membership made up of teams from New York, Philadelphia, Hartford, Boston, Chicago, Louisville, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, baseball had a controlling body. Through its ministrations there grew up the immensely complicated system of franchises, major and minor leagues, player contracts, and other business controls that now characterize the professional game. The National League gave baseball a new stability, restored public confidence in the contests among league teams, and put the sport really on its feet.

Sports History: A basic need for outdoor exercise to conserve national health

A basic need for outdoor exercise to conserve national health and the sponsorship of social leaders thus served in large measure to break down the barriers that had formerly stood in the way of the development of organized sports. Games which could appeal to every one had at last been invented or developed. And a post-war atmosphere, in which the instinct for pleasure is naturally intensified, provided fertile ground for the growth of these new forms of recreation. It is perhaps not so surprising after all that within a short quarter-century of the day when one English visitor declared that "to roll balls in a ten pin alley by gas-light or to drive a fast trotting horse in a light wagon along a very bad and dusty road, seems the Alpha and Omega of sport in the United States," almost every one of our modern games was being played by a rapidly growing army of enthusiasts.

The pioneer of them all, baseball, had evolved from the various bat-and-ball games that the early settlers had brought with them from England. A children's game actually known as base-ball had been played in the eighteenth century. It is noted in A Pretty Little Pocket Book, Intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly, which was first published in England in 1744 and soon after reprinted in this country. Jane Austen refers to it in Northanger Abbey. Four-old-cat, rounders, and town-ball, each of which contributed something to baseball, were also being played in the early nineteenth century by young men and boys throughout the country. Samuel Woodruff, writing on amusements in 1833, speaks of New Englanders as being experts in such games of ball as "cricket, base, cat, football, trap-ball."

But there was no formality about these early games -- no regular teams, no accepted rules of play, no scheduled contests. Cricket was the only one at all organized. New arrivals from England almost invariably formed cricket teams. It was an occasional diversion in all parts of the country, played north and south and on the western prairies. It was most general in and about Philadelphia, where groups of English factory-workers played weekly games. But cricket never really took hold in America. Its leisurely pace could not be reconciled with a frontier-nourished love for speed, excitement, action. It was steadily driven to the wall as the far more lively game of baseball, slowly taking its modern form and shape, made a more universal bid for popularity.

The date of baseball's emergence as a game definitely different from rounders or town-ball has been patriotically determined by a national commission which set out in 1907 to establish its American origins. But there is no recorded evidence to justify its conclusion that modern baseball stems from Abner Doubleday's supposed adoption of the diamond at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. Although town-ball as it was generally played at that time had four bases at the corners of a square and there were no foul balls (one hit the ball in any direction and ran), the diamond and other attributes of the modern game had already been adopted in both rounders and children's base-ball. The beginnings of the organized sport may perhaps be more accurately traced to a group of New York business and professional men who about 1842 began playing it at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken. They formally organized the Knickerbocker Club and under the lead of Alexander J. Cartwright adopted a code of rules which was printed in 1845. There were to be nine players
on each side, three men out constituted an inning, and the game was won by the first team to make twenty-one runs, or "aces" as they were then called. The first match game on record was played a year later with a picked team which called itself the New York Baseball Club, the "all-stars" winning 23 to 4 in four innings.

In keeping with their social status, the members of the Knickerbocker Club played in neat uniforms of blue trousers, white shirts, and straw hats. As important as the game was the formal dinner which followed it. For some time, indeed, every effort was made to keep baseball an exclusive sport, and not until the 1850's were more democratic clubs organized and the Knickerbockers compelled to recognize that workers as well as gentlemen could play the game. For there was no need in baseball to undergo the expense of maintaining a boat club or keeping up a stable of riding-horses. It wanted only an open field, a bat, and a ball. "The great mass, who are in a subordinate capacity," a contemporary pointed out succinctly, "can participate in this health giving and noble pastime."

The Rise of Sports

WHILE THE WEST WAS GOING THROUGH ITS GORGEOUS EPOCH OF gambling, drinking, and gun-play, a series of athletic crazes were sweeping through the states of the East. Baseball developed from its humble beginnings in the days before the Civil War to its recognized status as America's national game. The rapid spread of croquet caused the startled editors of The Nation to describe it as the swiftest and most infectious epidemic the country had ever experienced. Lawn tennis was introduced to polite society by enthusiasts who had seen it played in England, and the old sport of archery was revived as still another fashionable lawn game. Roller-skating attained a popularity which extended to all parts of the country. What the sewingmachine is to our industrial wants and the telegraph to our commercial pursuits, one devotee wrote rapturously, this new system of exercise had become to society's physical and social wants.

Track and field events were also promoted with the widespread organization of amateur athletic clubs; gymnastic games were sponsored both by the German Turnverein and the Y.M.C.A.; and in the colleges a spectacular sports phenomenon loomed over the horizon with the development of intercollegiate football. Society welcomed polo as an importation from abroad, took up the English sport of coaching. And finally a craze for bicycling arose to supersede all other outdoor activities as city streets and country roads became crowded with nattily dressed cyclists out on their club runs.

All this took place in the late 1860's and the 1870's. Previously the country had had virtually no organized sports as we know them to-day. Neither men nor women played outdoor games. Alarmed observers in mid-century had found the national health deteriorating because of a general lack of exercise more widespread than among the people of any other nation. Ralph Waldo Emerson had written despairingly of "the invalid habits of this country," and from abroad the London Times had issued grave warnings of possibly dire consequences for our national wellbeing. No transformation in the recreational scene has been more startling than this sudden burgeoning of an interest in sports which almost overnight introduced millions of Americans to a phase of life shortly destined to become a major preoccupation among all classes.

It was a phenomenon somewhat difficult to explain, but the first faint stirrings of popular interest may be traced to the decade before the Civil War. The decline of the informal sports associated with country festivals and frontier frolics, a consequence of the breaking-up of old forms of village association as the nation became more urbanized and of changes in farm economy which brought about the disappearance of such workplay occasions as the barn-raising and the husking-bee, had drawn attention to a parlous state of affairs. Many observers suddenly realized that the spectator sports of the period were a sorry substitute for what was being lost. This was not so important for the rural population, but it affected the townsman very seriously. "Who in this community really takes exercise?" Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked in the first issue of the Atlantic Monthly, in 1858. "Even the mechanic confines himself to one set of muscles; the blacksmith acquires strength in his right arm, and the dancing teacher in his left leg. But the professional or business man, what muscles has he at all?"

A campaign was started to break down the prejudice against sports as an idle diversion and to encourage more active participation in outdoor games. "The Americans as a people -- at least the professional and mercantile classes," Edward Everett declared, "have too little considered the importance of healthful, generous recreation. . . . Noble, athletic sports, manly outdoor exercises . . . which strengthen the mind by strengthening the body, and bring man into a generous and exhilarating communion with nature . . . are too little cultivated in town or country." With far greater emphasis but on very much the same grounds the editor of Harper's Monthly Magazine and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes lent the weight of their authority to the new cause. The former held the want of sports responsible for turning young America into "a pale, pasty-faced, narrow chested, spindled-shanked, dwarfed race -- a mere walking mannikin to advertise the latest cut of the fashionable tailor." The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table declared himself satisfied "that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from the loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage."

These diatribes bore some fruit in the 1850's. Skating was taken up so widely that the vogue for it became known as Higginson's Revival. Rowing grew so popular ( Charles W. Eliot was on the Harvard crew) that the New York Herald declared that if the boating era should continue another five years, "the coming generation will relieve America from the odium of physical decline." Nevertheless the flowering of sports awaited the post-war period, when they were given a primary impetus through being adopted by the world of fashion. The early rowing clubs had been composed of "young men of the highest respectability," but as the new games of the 1870's were introduced from England, for the rise of sports in the United States owed a very considerable debt to the sports revival in the mother country, it was more than ever society's leaders who first played them. The attempt was even made to monopolize them. Again and again the complacent statement may be found in contemporary articles in the better magazines that such and such a sportwhether tennis, polo, or bicycling -- does not "offer any attractions to the more vulgar elements of society." But the real significance of fashionable approval of sports lay in the fact that it awoke the interest of democracy. The common man eagerly followed where the aristocrat led. He could not be kept from any diversion within his means. "We may turn up our noses generally at those who in this country profess to lead fashions," Caspar Whitney, an early sports writer, declared some years later, "but in the matter of showing the way to healthy, vigorous outdoor play they have set a fine example and one that has taken a firm hold upon the people."

The effect of the automobile on recreational habits was often decried in the 1930's

The effect of the automobile on recreational habits was often decried in the 1930's: the substitution of a passive amusement for something more active; standardization and regimentation; the moral problem of the parked sedan and roadside tourist camp. The Sunday-afternoon drive was devastatingly described -- the crowded highways, traffic jams, and accidents; the car windows tightly closed against spring breezes; and whatever beauties the landscape might offer lying hidden behind forbidding lines of advertisements. "One arrives after a motor journey," one eminent sociologist wrote, "all liver and no legs; one's mind is asleep, one's body tired; one is bored, irritable, and listless. 25 But what such critics forgot was that the great majority of Sunday and holiday motorists, or even vacation tourists, would have been cooped up in crowded towns and cities except for the automobile.

The country they saw may at times have been almost blotted out by billboards and the air they breathed tainted by gasoline fumes. But the alternative in many cases would have been the movie, the dance-hall, or the beer-parlor. The steamboat and the railroad began a century ago to open up the world of travel and provide some means of holiday escape from one's immediate enviromnent, but until the coming of the automobile, recreation along these lines was a rare thing. The wealthy could make the fashionable tour in 1825, the well-to-do built up the summer resorts of the 1890's, but every Tom, Dick, and Harry toured the country in the 1930's -- thanks to the automobile.

Much of the criticism of the way the automobile was used in leisure-time activities may have been justified, but any gen, eral condemnation of its part in national recreation implies that pleasure travel, outdoor life, and many sports should have largely remained the prerogative of the wealthy few who could afford other means of transportation.

An automobile was generally ranked higher than ownership of one's home

The pleasures of vacation touring were depicted with even more fulsome praise of the joys of the open road. Every section of the country invited the growing army of motorists to visit it. Chambers of commerce, resort proprietors, and oil companies united in publicizing the attractions of seashore and mountain. New England was a summer vacation land, and Florida a popular winter resort. The national parks and forests, especially those of the West, drew hordes of visitors. In 1910 they had a few hundred thousand; the total in 1935 was thirty-four million. Almost all of them came by automobile. There was an overwhelming response to the slogan See America First as the new generation took to the road.

Accommodations to meet the needs of these motorists along the way sprang up quickly. The tourist camp became an institution. Some of them provided comfortable overnight cabins with all modern conveniences; others simply provided facilities for automobile campers. Florida probably had more of them than any other state. In 1925 it reported 178 with accommodations for six hundred thousand people. For the more fashionable there were hotels and inns -- there was a rapid growth of them in these years -- but the majority of tourists had little money to spend. An overnight cabin or a place where they could stretch a tarpaulin from the side of the car, cooking their own supper at a communal fireplace, was all that most of them demanded.

In the late 1930's the trailer made its appearance as still another boon for those with migratory instincts. The westerner whose forebears had crossed the prairies in a journey of several months trekked back over the old route, in a fraction of the time, with this twentieth-century equivalent of the covered wagon coupled to his car. The number of these vehicles increased rapidly; enthusiasts saw for them a future comparable to that of the automobile itself. In the bright dawn of trailer camping, about 1936, it was wildly stated that there would be a million of them on the road within a year and that a decade would see half the population on wheels. Such fantasies proved illusory; perhaps one hundred thousand passenger trailers, rather than a million, was the total later estimated by Trailer Travel.

Some seven hundred manufacturers had rushed into the field. Small machine-shops, bicycle manufacturers, out-of-work carpenters, hoped they had discovered the bootstrap to pull them out of the depression. But the boom faded away as annual production sought levels corresponding to the real demand. For, apart from the expense, new obstacles to further expansion sprang up in strict traffic regulations and bans on trailer parking. Municipalities did not take kindly to the home-on-wheels which could escape taxes and defy housing rules. Nevertheless in a more limited field the trailer provided a new means of touring which had wide appeal, becoming throughout the country a familiar symbol of the life of the highway. Trailer camps were established at the grounds of New York's World Fair, at Florida winter resorts, in the national parks of the Far West.

An important consequence of touring was the growth of a travel industry of immense proportions. In 1935 the American people were reported to have spent almost five per cent of their total income on vacation expenses. More than half this money, or about $1,330,000,000, represented automobile operating expenses that could be fairly allocated to the pleasure use of cars. Here was a sum greater than all moving-picture admissions, greater than the cost of any other form of recreation whatsoever. Add to it all the other expenses of motoring -- hotels, tourist camps, restaurants -- and some idea may be gained of the importance of the industry that catered to the motorists' needs. Half a century earlier there had been nothing comparable to automobile touring; it had now become an economic as well as social phenomenon of the utmost significance.

Just what a car meant in the lives of countless working-class families, entirely apart from the vogue for touring among those more likely to have summer vacations, was graphically revealed in the comments made by women interviewed in the course of the Middletown survey. "The car is the only pleasure we have," one of them stated; another declared, "I'll go without food before I'll see us give up the car"; and a mother of nine children said she would "rather do without clothes than give up the car." An automobile was generally ranked higher than ownership of one's home, before a telephone, electric lighting, or a bathtub. The experience of the depression widely confirmed the general willingness to sacrifice almost everything else in order to keep a car. Generally paid for on the instalment plan, it was the last thing to go. One of the steadiest products on the market was gasoline, bought by countless working-class families heroically economizing on food and clothes to be able to pay for their Sunday spin into the country.

In no other country in the world had motoring for pleasure developed on any such grandiose scale. Everywhere else the use of the automobile for recreation was largely limited, as it had been in the early days in this country, to the more wealthy classes. Only in the United States had a higher standard of living and mass production made possible such general ownership. A car for his family, to be used primarily for pleasure, was accepted as a valid ambition for every member of the American democracy.

It was the age of the automobile

The social changes wrought by the automobile had affected every phase of national life. Transportation was revolutionized, the isolation of the country broken down. No single development ever had a more far-reaching effect in speeding up the tempo of modern living. The entire face of the country was criss-crossed with highways of macadam and cement, lined with filling-stations, lunch-rooms, curio stores, antique shops, hot-dog stands, tourist camps, and signboards. It was the age of the automobile.

Nowhere were the changes more far-reaching than in popular recreation. At least one-quarter of the use of automobiles was estimated by the American Automobile Association to be for pleasure -- touring and holiday driving. Equally important was the extent to which it was used as an adjunct to pleasure, as a means of transportation from the country to the amusements of the city and from the city to the sports and outdoor activities of the country. For countless millions the automobile brought the near-by golf-course, tennis-courts, or bathing-beach within practical reach. It opened up the way for holiday picnics in the country and for week-end excursions to fish or hunt. It immensely stimulated the whole outdoor movement, making camping possible for throngs of people to whom woods, mountains, and streams were formerly totally inaccessible. It provided a means of holiday travel for a people whose migratory instinct appeared insatiable, making touring one of the most popular of all amusements.

The delights of a week-end or Sunday motor excursion into the country were spread glowingly over the pages of popular magazines in the advertisements published by manufacturers of popular models. The automobile was "the enricher of life." A midwestern bank president was quoted in one two-page spread in the Saturday Evening Post as declaring that "a man who works six days a week and spends the seventh on his own doorstep certainly will not pick up the extra dimes in the great thoroughfare of life." Another advertisement invited the car-owner to make the most of the next sunny Sunday -- "tell the family to hurry the packing and get aboard -- and be off with smiles down the nearest road -- free, loose, and happy -- bound for green wonderlands." The suggestion -- which innumerable families took -aroused the resentment of those religious elements in the population which believed church-going rather than motoring the way to spend the day, but the automobile finally completed the gradtions, lunch-rooms, curio stores, antique shops, hot-dog stands, tourist camps, and signboards. It was the age of the automobile.

Nowhere were the changes more far-reaching than in popular recreation. At least one-quarter of the use of automobiles was estimated by the American Automobile Association to be for pleasure -- touring and holiday driving. Equally important was the extent to which it was used as an adjunct to pleasure, as a means of transportation from the country to the amusements of the city and from the city to the sports and outdoor activities of the country. For countless millions the automobile brought the near-by golf-course, tennis-courts, or bathing-beach within practical reach. It opened up the way for holiday picnics in the country and for week-end excursions to fish or hunt. It immensely stimulated the whole outdoor movement, making camping possible for throngs of people to whom woods, mountains, and streams were formerly totally inaccessible. It provided a means of holiday travel for a people whose migratory instinct appeared insatiable, making touring one of the most popular of all amusements.

The delights of a week-end or Sunday motor excursion into the country were spread glowingly over the pages of popular magazines in the advertisements published by manufacturers of popular models. The automobile was "the enricher of life." A midwestern bank president was quoted in one two-page spread in the Saturday Evening Post as declaring that "a man who works six days a week and spends the seventh on his own doorstep certainly will not pick up the extra dimes in the great thoroughfare of life." Another advertisement invited the car-owner to make the most of the next sunny Sunday -- "tell the family to hurry the packing and get aboard -- and be off with smiles down the nearest road -- free, loose, and happy -- bound for green wonderlands." The suggestion -- which innumerable families took -aroused the resentment of those religious elements in the population which believed church-going rather than motoring the way to spend the day, but the automobile finally completed the gradtions, lunch-rooms, curio stores, antique shops, hot-dog stands, tourist camps, and signboards. It was the age of the automobile.

Nowhere were the changes more far-reaching than in popular recreation. At least one-quarter of the use of automobiles was estimated by the American Automobile Association to be for pleasure -- touring and holiday driving. Equally important was the extent to which it was used as an adjunct to pleasure, as a means of transportation from the country to the amusements of the city and from the city to the sports and outdoor activities of the country. For countless millions the automobile brought the near-by golf-course, tennis-courts, or bathing-beach within practical reach. It opened up the way for holiday picnics in the country and for week-end excursions to fish or hunt. It immensely stimulated the whole outdoor movement, making camping possible for throngs of people to whom woods, mountains, and streams were formerly totally inaccessible. It provided a means of holiday travel for a people whose migratory instinct appeared insatiable, making touring one of the most popular of all amusements.

The delights of a week-end or Sunday motor excursion into the country were spread glowingly over the pages of popular magazines in the advertisements published by manufacturers of popular models. The automobile was "the enricher of life." A midwestern bank president was quoted in one two-page spread in the Saturday Evening Post as declaring that "a man who works six days a week and spends the seventh on his own doorstep certainly will not pick up the extra dimes in the great thoroughfare of life." Another advertisement invited the car-owner to make the most of the next sunny Sunday -- "tell the family to hurry the packing and get aboard -- and be off with smiles down the nearest road -- free, loose, and happy -- bound for green wonderlands." The suggestion -- which innumerable families took -aroused the resentment of those religious elements in the population which believed church-going rather than motoring the way to spend the day, but the automobile finally completed the gradual transformation of the Sabbath from a day of rest and worship to one primarily devoted to recreation.

Henry Ford had played a leading part in making the automobile

Driving at night was not a usual practice, but one enthusiast contributed a special article on midnight motoring to the October, 1907, issue of Country Life. He painted a glowing picture -- the darkness pierced by the flaming arrow of the acetylene headlight, the road opening up like a titanic ribbon spun solely for the motorist's pleasure, the muffled roar of the motor in the deep silence of the night. It was a wonderful sensation as, with hands gripping the seats, hair blown back by the rushing wind, the car plunged "into that big mysterious dark always just ahead, always just beyond reach." One word of warning was given about night running. Should a carriage be encountered, the motorist should be ready to stop at once and attempt to calm the frightened horses by throwing his lap-robe (an essential article of equipment) over the headlights.

Suggestions for driving advised care not only for the safety of the highway, but to combat the prejudice that the automobile still aroused among non-motorists. The horn should be used gingerly because a sudden squeeze was frightening to both horses and pedestrians; headlights should be blown out on city streets; persons having trouble with their horses should be treated courteously, "especially ladies who are apt to be rather helpless in such cases." A final injunction urged special consideration for pedestrians. If they were forced to dodge a speeding car, they were very apt to describe it later, to the ill repute of all motoring, as "one of those (adjective) automobiles."

By 1914 the motor car had passed well beyond this pioneer stage. There were some two million in the country, and mass production was enabling the manufacturer to turn out cars that could be purchased for as little as $400. More important, the automobile had been so greatly improved that constant breakdowns were no longer the invariable rule of the road, and it was possible to operate a car without the prohibitive expenses of earlier days. Roads also were becoming immeasurably better. An advertisement of one second-hand car gave as the reason for sale that its owner had motored from Illinois and could not return because of bad roads, but the constant pressure of motorists was beginning to take effect in improved highways, macadam and even concrete, throughout the country.

Henry Ford had played a leading part in making the automobile more easily available to a broader public. His Model T was the most familiar of all makes, with half a million of them on the road before the World War. Hundreds of "tin Lizzie" jokes showed the place they had won in the country's life. Do you know what Ford is doing now? was a question the wary learned to ignore. But the answers were legion: enclosing a can-opener with every car so the purchaser could cut out his own doors; painting his cars yellow so that dealers could hang them in bunches and retail them like bananas; providing squirrels to retrieve any nuts that might rattle off. . . . Another story was that of the Illinois farmer who stripped the tin roof off his barn, sent it to the Ford factory, and received a letter saying that "while your car was an exceptionally bad wreck, we shall be able to complete repairs and return it by the first of the week."

The ubiquity of the Ford, as well as of the Ford joke, clearly indicated that the automobile had completely passed through that stage when it could be considered a plaything for the rich or an instigator of socialism. It was reaching the American public -- the workingman and the farmer. And throughout the period of the World War this general process of diffusion went on at an increasingly rapid rate. The two million cars of 1914 had become nine million by 1921. In another five years this number had doubled. So great was public interest in the automobile that when Ford brought out a new car in 1927, the formal unveiling of the Model A attracted almost as much attention as a presidential inauguration. Thousands flocked to the Ford show-rooms in Detroit, the mounted police had to be called out in Cleveland, a mob stormed the exhibition at Kansas City, and a million people fought to get a glimpse of the new car at the Ford headquarters in New York.

Succeeding years saw a still further increase in the number of passenger cars on the road. In the 1930's the total rose to over twenty-five million -- an automobile for more than two-thirds of the families throughout the country. Such far-reaching improvements had been made that there was now almost no resemblance to the horseless carriage of forty years earlier. The modern car was long and low, showing a definite trend toward stream-lining, and the closed sedan had almost entirely replaced the open touring-car. It could be operated easily and was as nearly foolproof as human ingenuity could make it. It was equipped with such an array of conveniences -- from self-starters to heaters -- that one could motor with a degree of comfort the pioneer automobilists could not possibly have imagined. Winter motoring -- certainly for short trips -- was almost as feasible as summer outings. Should anything go wrong, the uniformity of popular models made repairs comparatively easy, but motorists could count so definitely on the dependability of their cars that they hardly knew what was under the hood. It was seldom necessary even to change tires, so greatly had their durability and potential mileage been increased. Everyone could drive a car, and every one did. In the 1890's the tremendous vogue for the bicycle had given the impression that America was a nation on wheels. Half a century later this appeared to be even more true -- but on automobile wheels.

The sport of motoring was hazardous and exciting in the first decade of the 20th century

The sport of motoring was hazardous and exciting as well as costly in the first decade of the 20th century. A long course of instruction was necessary to learn how to drive, the schools providing preliminary practice in gear-shifting and steering behind dummy wheels before the pupil was allowed to venture on the road. He was also taught something about the engine, how to make the necessary repairs and replace parts. Many car-owners became adept at tinkering with the engine, but this phase of motoring was not always considered fun. "The nerve strain of working over those jarring parts, if you have no mechanical instinct," wrote one harassed motorist, "would take away all the pleasure of ownership." One of the most popular automobile jokes was that of the car-owner's ward in the insane asylum. A visitor one day was surprised to find it apparently empty. The physician in charge explained that the patients were all under the cots fixing the slats.

Vast preparations had to be made for a day's run, let alone for the vacation tours which were becoming popular as the automobile very gradually became a more reliable vehicle. Among the items of extra equipment necessary were a full set of tools, elaborate tire-changing apparatus, a pail of water for overheated brakes, extra spark-plugs, tire chains for muddy roads, and a "rear basket with concealed extra gasoline supply." Clothes also were important. In this period the cars were all open, many of them without tops or even wind-shields, and the roads were incredibly dusty. The motorist had to be prepared for all contingencies, laden down with dusters, raincoats, umbrellas, and goggles. A single-breasted duster with eton collar and three patch pockets was recommended for mild weather, but men were further advised to have wind cuffs to be attached to their coat sleeves, caps with visors and adjustable goggles, and leggings for repair work.

For women the problem of the proper motoring clothes was even more important. One had to be fashionable, but everyday styles were hardly adapted to exposure to sun, wind, and dust. Bell-shaped ruffled skirts trailed the ground, and large picture hats were fastened upon imposing pompadours with a multitude of gleaming hat-pins. To motor, all this fine array had to be carefully protected. Long linen dusters were worn, lap-robes tucked securely about the legs, and hats tied down with long veils knotted tightly under the chin.

In 1907 a hundred miles was considered an excellent day's run. There had to be a lot of "sprinting at thirty miles an hour" to get over such a long distance. The average speed was a good deal lower, but fast driving had already become a problem. "The effect of speedy motoring," commented one automobilist, "is that of drinking several cups of strong coffee," and the pre-war generation appears to have had a strong urge to experience this intoxicating sensation. To control these maddened motorists, who frightened horses, upset carriages, and more and more frequently maimed and killed other users of the roads while they escaped uninjured, strict speeding regulations were adopted in a number of states. The law in New York provided a maximum of ten miles an hour in congested areas, fifteen miles an hour in the outlying sections of cities and towns, and twenty miles an hour in the open country.

The Early History of the Automobile

The Early History of the Automobile, in so far as recreation is concerned, could hardly have afforded a more striking contrast to that of the movies. There were in all in this country some three hundred horseless carriages -- gasoline buggies, electrics, steam cars -- when moving pictures were first thrown on a screen in 1895. When John P. Harris opened his pioneer moving-picture theatre a decade later, there were almost eighty thousand. 1 But though the early period of automobiling coincided so exactly with the years of the nickelodeon madness, the automobile and the movies reached entirely different groups of people.

The movies were for the masses, the automobile for the classes. The distinction could not have been more pronounced. The generalization may be hazarded that none of that vast nickelodeon audience ever even hoped to own or drive a car, while very few of the little band of wealthy automobile owners would have condescended to go to the movies. The first decade of the century witnessed a remarkable expansion in these two new forms of amusement, but it was then impossible to foresee that higher standards of entertainment would soon draw all classes of society into the moving-picture theatres and that the reduced costs of operating an automobile would in time enable all the world to motor. It was not until after 1920 that the movies and motoring could be grouped together as popular forms of recreation in which no class barriers were recognized.

THE RESTRICTION of motoring to the wealthy in the early period of the automobile was not primarily due to the cost of the cars. Although current prices ran as high as $7,000, runabouts could be bought for under $500 and Ford touring-cars for $780 as early as 1911. This was not cheap from the workingman's point of view, but what really made touring such an exclusive prerogative of the rich was the expense of upkeep and operation. The lowest estimate in a magazine series appearing in 1907 was $358 for a six-months' season in which the car-owner drove 3,3710 miles. New tires cost $100, minor parts $96, new parts and work on the engine $70, and gasoline $45. A more typical estimate for an expensive car set the total for a year's operating expenses at $3,628. A number of extras were included in this figure: a cape top and glass front, a speedometer, an exhaust-blown horn, and an allowance ($264) for motoring clothes. Nevertheless it graphically reflected the continual drain for repairs and new tires which featured all pre-war motoring. The year's upkeep of a car appears generally to have come very close in these days to its original cost.

The new "automobility" came in for its full share of jokes and jibes, and also bitter denunciation, as the common man watched the newly rich ride proudly through the gates of society in their Cadillacs, Locomobiles, Packards, and Pierce-Arrows. Life paro, died "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1904:

Half a block, half a block,
Half a block onward,
All in their automobiles,
Rode the Four Hundred.
'Forward!' the owners shout,
'Racing cir!' 'Runabout!'
Into Fifth Avenue
Rode the Four Hundred.

Some three years later, Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, gravely warned that "nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of the automobile." He declared that to the worker and the farmer the motorist was "a picture of the arrogance of wealth, with all its independence and carelessness."

An expensive amusement not only summed up the general opinion of the automobile in these pioneer years, but appeared to be all that could be expected of it. It was a plaything for the rich. Motoring and automobile racing took a place in the lives of wealthy sportsmen which had formerly been held by coaching; it was regarded as a sport comparable to yachting or riding to hounds. Operating expenses and the inevitability of breakdowns for long shut out any idea of the automobile's more general usefulness, either as a means of transportation in the business and commercial world or as a popular recreation for the people as a whole. As late as 1911 Charles J. Glidden could single out as the primary effect of the advent of the automobile that it had "completely revolutionized the life of well-to-do people."

Creative thinking as the process of sensing gaps or disturbing

Many writers have cited evidence concerning the relative independence of measures of intelligence and measures of creativity or imagination, especially when quality rather than fluency is considered. What, then, is the nature of these thinking abilities which are different from those assessed by tests of intelligence? What is creative thinking?

I have chosen to define creative thinking as the process of sensing gaps or disturbing, missing elements; forming ideas or hypotheses concerning them; testing these hypotheses; and communicating the results, possibly modifying and retesting the hypotheses. I have been quite willing to subsume in this definition the major features of most other definitions which have been proposed. Something new is included in all of them. Sir Frederick Bartlett employs the term of "adventurous thinking" which he characterizes as "getting away from the main track, breaking out of the mold, being open to experience, and permitting one thing to lead to another." Simpson defined creative ability as the initiative which one manifests by his power to break away from the usual sequence of thought into an altogether different pattern of thought. Concerning the problem of identification, he says that we must look for a searching, combing, synthetic type of mind. Such concepts as curiosity, imagination, discovery, innovation, and invention are prominent in discussions of the meaning of creativity.

In accepting this kind of definition of creativity, a variety of kinds of behavior are included. It is my opinion that we must continue to do this. By this, it is not meant that we should try to represent all of these abilities and∕or behaviors by any single index. Neither does it mean that we are now ready to establish a set of discreet abilities or pure factors.

In order to identify and measure the abilities involved in the creative process, it is necessary to understand the nature of the creative process. Many workers have sought to describe the process, and these descriptions show remarkable agreement. Most analysts identify four steps: preparation, incubation, illumination, and revision. Apparently the process flows something like the following. First, there is the sensing of a need or deficiency, random exploration, and a clarification or "pinning down" of the problem. Then ensues a period of preparation accompanied by reading, discussing, exploring, and formulating many possible solutions, and then critically analyzing these solutions for advantages and disadvantages. Out of all this comes the birth of a new idea -- a flash of insight, illumination. Finally, there is experimentation to evaluate the most promising solution for eventual selection and perfection of the idea. Such an idea may find embodiment in inventions, scientific theories, improved products or methods, novels, musical composition, paintings, or new designs.

The creative thinking abilities presumed to be involved in creative thinking. The emphasis in measurement has been on the product rather than the process. Because of the nature of the creative process and of the limitations of testing situations, only rare attempts have been made to assess the process.

Help Parents Understand Their Creative Child

One of the most tragic plights I have witnessed among highly creative individuals stems from the failure of their parents to understand them. Frequently destructive or incapacitating hostility is the result of this failure. When teachers fail to understand highly creative children, refusal to learn, delinquency, or withdrawal may be a consequence. In some cases, the quiet and unobtrusive intervention of the counselor offers about the only possibility whereby parents and teachers may come to understand them and thus salvage much outstanding talent.

Guidance workers need to help parents and teachers recognize that everyone possesses to some degree the ability involved in being creative, that these abilities can be increased or decreased by the way children are treated, and that it is a legitimate function of the home and the school to provide the experiences and guidance which will free them to develop and function fully. Of course, these abilities are inherited, in the broad sense, that one inherits sense organs, a peripheral nervous system, and a brain. The type of pursuit of these abilities and the general tendency to persist in their search is largely a matter of the way parents and teachers treat children's creative needs.

Guidance workers can, as I see it, help parents to guide highly creative children in two major ways. The first concerns the parent's handling of the child's unusual ideas and questions, and the other involves helping such a child become less obnoxious without sacrificing his creativity.

The school should help parents recognize that criticism -- making fun of the child's ideas or laughing at his conclusions -- can prevent his expression of ideas. The parent's experienced eyes and ears can help the child learn to look for and to listen to important sights and sounds. The parent should stimulate the child to explore, ask questions, and try to find answers.

Many parents attempt too early to eliminate fantasy from the thinking of the child. Fantasy is regarded as something unhealthy and to be eliminated. Fantasies such as imaginative role playing, fantastic stories, unusual drawings, and the like are normal aspects of a child's thinking. Many parents are greatly relieved to learn this and out of this understanding grows a better parent-child relationship. Certainly we are interested in developing a sound type of creativity, but this type of fantasy, it seems to me, must be kept alive until the child's intellectual development is such that he can engage in sound creative thinking. I have seen many indications in our testing of first and second graders that many children with impoverished imaginations have been subjected to rather vigorous and stern efforts to eliminate fantasy too early. They are afraid to think.

Counselors and administrators can be sympathetic with teachers and parents who are irritated by the unending curiosity and manipulativeness of highly creative children. Endless questioning and experimenting can be inconvenient. Parents may not appreciate the child's passion for first-hand observation. Persistent questioning can be very annoying. A mother of a three-year old complained, "He wears me out just asking questions. He won't give up either, until he gets an answer; it's just awful when be gets started on something!"

Counselors, teachers, and administrators can help parents recognize the fact that there is value in such curiosity and manipulativeness and that there can be no substitute for it. Parents should be encouraged to help the child learn to ask good questions, how to make good guesses at the answers, and how to test the answers against reality.

Most parents find it extremely difficult to permit their children to learn on their own -- even to do their school work on their own. Parents want to protect their children from the hurt of failing. Individual administration of problems involving possible solutions to frustrating situations has shown that the imagination of many children is inhibited by the tremendous emphasis which has been placed on prevention. For example, many of our third graders were so obsessed with the thought that Mother Hubbard should have prevented her predicament that they were reluctant to consider possible solutions to her problem. This may possibly be related to the criticism of some observers that American education prepares only for victory or success and not for possible frustration or even failure.

Certainly teaching of all kinds of failure is important, but overemphasis may deter children from coping imaginatively and realistically with frustration and failure, which cannot be prevented. It may rob the child of his initiative and resourcefulness. All children learn by trial and error. They must try, fail, try another method, and if necessary, try even again. Of course, they need guidance, but they also need to find success by their own efforts. Each child strives for independence from the time he learns to crawl, and independence is a necessary characteristic of the creative personality.

Creative Personality - Help Him Understand His Divergence


A high degree of sensitivity, a capacity to disturbed, and divergent thinking are essentials of the creative personality. Frequently, creative children are puzzled by their own behavior. They desperately need help in understanding themselves, particularly their divergence. The following story written by a fourth grader about a lion that won't roar illustrates the divergent child's search for someone who will understand him:

. . . Charlie had just one great wish. It was to be able to roar. You see when Charlie was born he quickly turned hoarse. As soon as he was nine years old, he went to ask Polly the parrot. But she said, "Go ask Blacky the crow."

So off went poor Charlie to see Blacky. When he got there, he asked, "Blacky, why, oh why can't I roar?"

But Blacky only replied, "Don't you see, Charlie, I'm busy. Go see Jumper the kangaroo. She can help you."

Jumper didn't understand Charlie's problem. But she did give him some advice. Jumper said, "Go ask the wise old owl."

The wise old owl understood everything. He told Charlie, "I hate to say this, but if you really want to know, you're scared of everything."

Charlie thanked him and hurried home. To this day Charlie can't roar, but how happy he is to know why he can't.

There are crucial times in the lives of creative children when being understood is all that is needed to help them cope with the crisis and maintain their creativity.

Let Him Communicate His Ideas

The highly creative child has an unusually strong urge to explore and to create. When he thinks up ideas, or tests them, and modifies them, he has an unusually strong urge to communicate his ideas and the result of his tests. Yet both peers and teachers named some of the most creative children in our studies as ones who "do not speak out their ideas." When we see what happens when they do "speak out their ideas," there is little wonder that they are reluctant to communicate their ideas. Frequently, their ideas are so far ahead of those of their classmates and even their teachers that they have given up hope of communicating.

All school guidance workers need to learn to perform this function more effectively. They must genuinely respect the questions and ideas of children to sustain the highly creative child so that he will continue to think.

The highly creative person is "a little crazy"

Why should counselors, teachers, and administrators be concerned with the problems of creative individuals? What business is it of theirs whether or not one is highly creative? Doesn't everybody know that the highly creative person is "a little crazy" and that you can't help him anyway? If he's really creative, why does he need guidance anyway? He should be able to solve his own problems. He's creative, isn't he?

Unfortunately, these are attitudes which have long been held by some of our most eminent scholars and which still prevail rather widely. Most of the educators I know perk up when they discover a child with a high Intelligence Quotient or a high score on some other traditional measure of intellectual talent. They are impressed! Most of them are rather impressed if they discover in a child some outstanding talent for music, or art, or the like. Some counselors and psychologists even go to the trouble of testing such things as finger dexterity and speed in checking numbers and names. Not a counselor or psychologist among my acquaintance, however, bothers about obtaining measures of their client's creative thinking abilities. I was trained in counseling myself and did work as a high school and college counselor for several years, and for two years I served as the director of a university counseling bureau.

In all this time, I never did hear anyone mention a test of creative thinking. I certainly never used one! What puzzles me, however, is why I remained so ignorant of such instruments. I find now that many such tests have been developed only during the past seventy years. Descriptions of these tests are now fairly detailed and scoring procedures can be satisfactorily reproduced. The reason for this state of affairs is simply that we have not really considered this kind of talent important. This kind of talent has not been valued and rewarded in our educational system, so guidance workers have seen little reason to identify it and to try to contribute to its growth.

Early twentieth century - Revolution in Physics

In the early twentieth century, physics stood out as the dominant natural science--displacing biology and geology, which had held a similar position in the age of Darwin. In both cases the reasons for preeminence were the same. In the late nineteenth century, the biological sciences provided the metaphors and ways of thought--positive, determinist, material--that were congenial to the wider intellectual temper and seemed most readily applicable in other fields. In the twentieth century, the more abstract and indeterminate language of physics appealed to a society that was questioning nearly all the old certainties. Furthermore, a spurt of progress resembling that which biology had made in the second half of the nineteenth century was to give physics a special prestige in the first third of the century following.

At its earliest, the twentieth-century revolution in physics can be dated from 1895, when Professor Wilhelm Konrad R"ntgen of Munich discovered X rays. Thus began the atomic age, as one revelation followed another in quick succession. A year after R"ntgen's discovery, Henri Becquerel's experiments with uranium opened the way to an analysis of radioactivity, on which Pierre Curie and his wife were soon to be working, and in the next year, the identification of the electron as a negatively electrified corpuscle suggested an approach to explaining this whole series of new phenomena.

Initially, the explanations were presented in terms that combined the old Newtonian principles of motion with the nineteenth-century concept of electricity. Thus the physicists of the first decade of the twentieth century viewed electricity as the common property of all matter and pictured the atom as a miniature Newtonian solar system, in which the positively charged nucleus held in dynamic tension negatively charged electrons--varying in number from one in the case of hydrogen to ninety-two in the case of uranium I--that were circling in orbits around it. In this fashion, a physicist like Lord Rutherford (first in Montreal and Manchester, subsequently in Cambridge) in 1903 was able to ascribe radioactivity to an explosive disintegration of atoms of great weight--that is, which had a large number of electrons in orbit--and seven years later to make the basic discovery that identified the nucleus of the atom with its positive charge.

Many previously unfamiliar phenomena fitted conveniently into the new explanatory scheme. On the border line between physics and chemistry, it enabled scientists to bring to virtual completion the periodic table of the atoms by locating several theoretically possible elements that earlier had escaped detection. Meantime, however, two further threats to intellectual consistency had appeared. In different forms, the discoveries of Albert Einstein and Max Planck, both of Berlin, overturned the newly devised scheme of explanation and opened the major phase in the physical revolution that is still going on.

Einstein's work bore only tangentially on atomic theory, since it dealt chiefly with mechanics and astrophysics. As early as 1905, he had suggested that the notion of space and time as absolutes needed to be abandoned, that these were categories derived from metaphysics and should properly be viewed as always relative to the person measuring them. During the First World War, Einstein extended his theory to take account of the phenomenon of gravitation. This he explained in terms of a four-dimension continuum--in which time was the fourth dimension--and a "curved" universe that made possible the eventual return of light waves to their starting point. During the eclipse of 1919, Einstein's calculation of the deflection of light was confirmed by simultaneous astronomical observations from points on both shores of the South Atlantic.
Even for atomic physics, however, the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity were already clear: the hard, solid "matter" of traditional science-which men like Rutherford had dissolved into electricity--needed to be redefined still further in terms that made its particles no more than a "series of events in space-time." These conclusions were confirmed by the more directly relevant theories of Max Planck who, independently of Einstein, had almost simultaneously arrived at equally revolutionary conclusions.

Planck originally devised his "quantum theory" in 1901 to take account of certain jumps and discontinuities which he had observed in radiation phenomena. According to his new explanation, radiation did not come in continuous waves but rather in definite units or quanta. Indeed it was in terms of quanta, Planck argued, that energy in general and changes of atomic structure in particular should be viewed. At the start, physicists did not quite realize how novel this theory was, and the efforts of Niels Bohr of Copenhagen to fit Planck's quanta into the "solar-system" explanation of the atom seemed initially successful. In 1913, Bohr, working in Rutherford's laboratory, devised a way of combining the English physicist's theory of orbits with a concept of a series of "jumps" of electrons from one orbit to another.

For twelve years, this reconciliatory theory held the field. Then in 1925, the final and culminating phase of the revolution in physics began when it was discovered that Bohr's explanations did not account for all the phenomena observed in the hydrogen spectrum. Soon new theories of a bewildering diversity and complexity began competing for acceptance. On the one hand, Heisenberg argued for a complete discarding of physical hypotheses such as orbits--which he found unwarranted by the facts--in favor of the more abstract language of differential equations. On the other hand, Schr"dinger turned to the theory of wave mechanics that Prince Louis de Broglie had developed in France. Schr"dinger contended that a stream of electrons should be regarded as having certain properties of a wave as well as those of a series of particles. Meanwhile Bohr himself began to revise his earlier theories, and a large number of other physicists. British, Continental, and American, branched out into still newer hypotheses that the quantum theory had suggested.

A theoretical situation of unparalleled complexity resulted. Only on the ground of mathematics--where Heisenberg's and Schr"dinger's equations proved to be equivalent--could the new explanations meet. In terms of classical mechanics, unitary theory had broken down completely. Sometimes one spoke of particles; sometimes of waves. Physicists chose between the two on a pragmatic basis as one theory rather than the other seemed to fit particular experimental facts. Discontinuity, indeterminacy, and uncertainty replaced the earlier clear and unilateral explanations. Just as in the first stage of the revolution in physics, Rutherford and his colleagues had dissolved matter into motion and electricity, so in its second and third stages the notion of electricity itself began to break down, as the final explanations of science were resolved into either mathematics or mystery.

Mystery was the first of two contrasting implications that contemporaries drew from the twentieth-century revolution in scientific theory. If the physicists themselves--the acknowledged masters of abstract science--could not agree and were unsure of their conclusions, what was the mere layman to think? How was he to distinguish fact from fancy in the physical world? Thus the ordinary educated man who had picked up something of the new physics tended to turn either to skepticism or to religion. He might choose to live in a state of suspended judgment and philosophical pluralism. On the other hand he might decide to take a leap into religious faith--if the physical world was ultimately a mystery--that proved how right were the theologians who had always argued that this was so. The new self-doubt on the part of the natural scientists of the 1920's had not a little to do with the return to religion that was to be so striking a phenomenon in the two succeeding decades.

The second implication of the new discoveries was at first less troubling. However bewildering abstract scientific theory might appear around 1930, on the level of practical applications scientists were advancing from triumph to triumph. Two discoveries of the year 1919 inaugurated the period of applied atomic physics--the invention of the mass spectroscope, which made possible the identification of more than two hundred stable isotopes (i.e., variant forms of the basic atoms), and Rutherford's initial experiment with controlled atomic transformations. During further experiments of the latter sort, physicists discovered a whole new series of constituent particles of the atom comparable to electrons--positrons, protons, neutrons, and the like--until by 1944 seven in all had been identified. The most far-reaching of these discoveries was the identification of the neutron by Sir James Chadwick in 1932. It was with particles of this kind which carried no charge and hence could pass freely through the atoms in their paths, that the physicists began the intense bombardment of basic matter which was to culminate during the Second World War in the awesome discovery of the atomic bomb.

1920's Europe: The Major Centers

In novelty of expression, defeated Germany took the lead. This was perhaps natural since German society was so much more gravely disturbed by the war and its aftermath than were the societies of France or Britain. In Germany, the former ruling classes--and the culture they embodied--had abdicated their authority. The prewar Reich had exuded an atmosphere of stuffiness and selfsatisfaction; in postwar Germany, the cultural temper was raffish, tormented, and revolutionary. For a number of years, the young insurgents had the arts almost entirely to themselves, and even when life became somewhat more stable, the cultural atmosphere of Weimar Germany remained incomparably lively and diverse. Only in the quieter university towns did intellectual activity continue much as before. These towns kept their previous eminence--as did the artistic and literary center of Munich. But the great novelty was the sudden emergence of Berlin, modern, untrammeled by tradition, and the largest city on the European continent, as the most experimental and daring center of all.

Paris, however, still eclipsed Berlin in range of cultural activity. The city on the Seine remained what it had been for centuries--the literary and artistic capital of Europe. Indeed, in certain respects Paris increased its earlier lead. In the field of painting it had no rival: the School of Paris drew into its orbit not only the most varied talents from all parts of France but also the eager and ambitious who poured in from Spain and Italy, from Russia and America. In the ballet, in the theater, in the novel, Paris enjoyed a preeminence that was reinforced by the talents of foreigners. The Russian ballet, the American expatriate novelists like Ernest Hemingway suggest how postwar conditions intensified artists' long-established tendency to seek in Paris the ideal city for cultural creation.

In different ways, then, Berlin and Paris both profited because other centers had apparently become less hospitable to talent. American writers fled to France in revulsion against postwar conventionality and "materialism" in their own country. Austr ians and Hungarians, who had become accustomed to life in great capital cities, felt cramped and stifled within the narrow confines to which the settlement of 1919 had reduced their national communities. Tens of thousands of educated Russians fled from Bolshevik tyranny, as did a smaller number of Italians after the establishment of the Fascist dictatorship. Thus the 1920's saw the beginnings of that uprooting of European intellectuals which was to become almost a mass movement in the next two decades.

Two further changes occurred. In England, the decade of the 1920's was characterized by an extraordinary deprovincializing of cultural life. No longer did Britain seem so separated from the Continent as it had once been; no longer were the British themselves so satisfied with their traditional island ways. Now they were much more ready to learn from the French and the Germans, the Russians and the Austrians. Here again the experience of four years of fighting in a continental war doubtless contributed to the change of attitude. Before 1914, the "Bloomsbury circle," for example, had been a group of very young writers without much influence; now it set the intellectual fashions by quiet but persuasive propaganda for French painting, the Russian ballet, and Viennese psychoanalysis. The Bloomsbury group had grown up in the intense intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge--and the 1920's were also to be the period in which the preeminence of Cambridge in physics and philosophy won nearly universal recognition. The twenties likewise saw a form of art, music--that Britain for two centuries had chiefly regarded as an alien importation from the Continent--at length achieving a new status, as major native composers awakened the interest of an alert and educated public.

Finally, in this remarkable decade Spain emerged from its long intellectual isolation. In the philosopher Ortega and the poet Lorca, Spain produced writers whose interests were European in scope and who were read throughout the Continent. In retrospect this intellectual revival in the Iberian Peninsula was to seem tragically futile when, a decade later, it was cut off by civil war and the ensuing dictatorship of General Franco. The war cost Lorca his life and drove Ortega into uncompromising opposition to Franco's repression of intellectual liberty.

The Culture of the 1920's

Although in politics and economics the 1920's were predominantly years of conservatism and caution, in cultural life, these years were marked by bold innovation. In this decade, the "modern temper" finally triumphed, altering the character of science and the arts for a full generation. Yet the change was far from uniform. In each cultural area, words like modern or contemporary carried very different meanings. In physics, they meant relatively, plural explanations, and indeterminacy; in social thought, they suggested both a cult of the irrational and a meticulous concern for precise meanings; in literature, they conveyed the triumph of symbolic forms of expression; in the line arts and music, they signified a revolt against sentimentality and an inclination toward sharp tones and hard outlines. But in every instance, twentieth-century styles had a common scorn toward the preceding century: the cultural innovators rejected the lessons of their grandfathers and self-consciously chose new idioms of expression.

Toward the generation of their fathers, however, they frequently showed more respect. Actually, the cultural innovations of the 1920's were not as startling as they seemed to the contemporary public. Many--perhaps most--of them were the logical outgrowths of changes that had occurred a generation earlier. The twentieth-century revolution in physics had its origins in the 1890's, as did Freud's theory of psychoanalysis and Sch"nberg's twelve-tone scale. Indeed, in the last two instances, the innovators themselves found in the 1920's the wider audience that they had earlier been unable to reach. Such experiences were common in the immediate postwar years: ideas or modes of expression that before the war had appeared to be revolutionary or impossibly difficult now began to attract the attention and to win the allegiance of the general educated public.

The war itself, of course, contributed to this increased receptiveness to cultural novelty. The social and psychological shocks that four years of struggle had inflicted disturbed established patterns of thought and expression and prepared men's minds for new ways of looking at the universe. Again and again in the postwar years, men asserted that Europe's traditional culture had failed--that the leisurely cultural traditions of the European upper bourgeoisie no longer sufficed to express the new realities of life--that something sharper and more vital must be created to take its place. The result was a cultural and scientific outpouring of a richness that no other single decade in the century can match.

Garden City and Suburban Planning

With the Arcadian and Utopian idea continually before him, the average American considers the ideal living conditions to be such as will allow him a maximum of space in an individual home, preferably in the suburbs. Beginning with the town of Pullman, founded in 1880 at Gary, Indiana, there rose in America several privately planned suburban real-estate developments. Following that start, a number of industrial towns like Walpole, Massachusetts, and Overlook County Colony, planned for the General Chemical Company near Wilmington, Delaware, were patterned after Letchworth, the first garden city of England, Tours in France, or Emden in Germany.

During the World War I and shortly afterward a number of industrial villages were planned by the federal government. Three, in particular, deserve mention: Union Park Gardens, Wilmington, Delaware, built for shipworkers; one near Bridgeport, Connecticut, for munitions workers; and Yorkship Village near Camden, New Jersey. These garden cities are so arranged that houses and apartments are convenient to through traffic streets and car lines without being directly on them. Each town has a community center with school, city hall, stores, and recreation areas. Considerable attention is given in all these projects to landscaping, the houses being arranged in irregular building lines along curved roadways, so that the owner of each, on approaching his home, gains a distinctive pictorial impression.

In most garden cities frame houses built in a style derived from a combination of the early New England frame, gable construction, with irregular ground plan, are the rule. Since such houses appear best in combination with elms and maples, the streets are planted with these trees, whose lines carry the impression of the central parkway with its brook over into the residence area. Lawns without fences or hedges lend an air of continuity and friendliness to the community. Obviously, the cost of such houses as described, coupled with high commutation rates, make these developments available to only the high-salaried classes. Underpaid factory workers or people in the seasonal industries, without steady employment, are obliged to live in the abandoned small tenement houses or flats nearer the centers of industry.

After 1929, the federal government allocated funds for two types of housing developments: (1) garden cities for the lower salaried professional class; (2) large apartment-house developments for industrial workers. Of the former, Norris, Tennessee, and Greenbelt, Maryland, are leading examples. Detroit, Cleveland, and New York have begun the construction of a number of community apartment houses like the Karl Marx Apartment in Vienna, which will eventually give to the underprivileged classes rooms renting from six to ten dollars a month. In some cases, trade guilds such as the Stocking Makers' Union in Philadelphia and the Tailors' Union in New York City have undertaken the construction of well-equipped apartments to rent for reasonable rates. These apartments are planned with outside windows. They have good cross ventilation, a modicum of privacy, standardized sanitary and heating equipment. Some have balconies, porches, and roof facilities for sunshine and recreation. In their fireproof construction, the newest types of insulated noiseproof walls and in some cases glass bricks are being used. A comparison of any of these examples with any slum will convince one that only from such surroundings as those provided by these new, clean homes can we hope to gain a healthy democracy, capable of producing an art of refinement and distinction. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and beauty rarely comes from homes of squalor.

City Planning in America

Two of the earliest colonial leaders in America, General Oglethorpe and William Penn, laid down plans for cities which today place Oglethorpe, Georgia, and Philadelphia delphia far ahead of such haphazard developments as Boston. The nation's capital, designed by Major L'Enfant, has a number of radiating avenues converging upon the central dome of the Capitol. Although his plan was forgotten for many years, interest in it was revived during the administration of President Wilson, when new buildings had to be constructed to accommodate the increased governmental activity.

The prime difficulty in most city planning until the 20th century was due to the fact that too few trained individuals had given specific thought to such problems as the regulation of traffic, control of the ingress of food stuffs, and the elimination of waste material. No one had considered the city as a greatly magnified human being which needed light, air, and exercise, as well as protection from the smoke and noise of the machine. As cities simply grew, with the great concentration of population in the slums and with the advent of the skyscrapers, daily drawing their thousands of occupants from suburban areas, the problems of congestion and health control eventually forced the architects to think in terms of the efficiently planned metropolis. In the 20th century, a few enlightened industrialists also began to perceive that well-housed, healthy workers are a necessary part of the long-range planning for a stable industrial civilization.

Since each community represents a tremendous capital investment owned by countless individuals, many of whom will be affected adversely by any change proposed, the problem of city planning in the towns already built becomes primarily one of a social and political nature. New laws must be passed enabling local governments to condemn unsafe and unsanitary areas. New funds must be voted to buy land on which to construct high-speed roadways or the necessary parks to accommodate great populations. The chief problems of city planning for the latter half of the 20th century continue to be those of slum clearance, adequate housing for the lower salaried classes, more rapid and efficient means of communication for traffic and commodities, and the making available of adequate healthy recreational centers for anemic city dwellers.

The practical city, of necessity, looks well. The grouping or zoning of the city's various functions necessitates that those buildings which have to do with government and the commercial life be arranged in the center, like the medieval Rathäuser and the guildhalls. From this center the brain of the city can most easily control the industrial and transportational developments that connect it with the outside world. Naturally, the problems differ somewhat between seaport and inland towns. Residential facilities must be regulated by the presence or absence of nuisance factors, such as smoke, noise, and poisonous fumes, connected with the city's industrial plants.

Many city governments or groups of businessmen interested in real estate engaged architects to study the problems of city planning after the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. New York passed her tenement-house act in 1900, after many surveys showed that conditions were rapidly growing worse. Chicago and San Francisco developed city plans for further development in 1910; Cleveland and Philadelphia followed. In most of these plans definite attempts were made to arrange governmental office sections with regard to monumental groupings of buildings, the employment of vistas, focal points of interest, and the regulation of monuments along lines laid down by the Parisian city planners during the Napoleonic Empire. These had already been partially successful in the case of Washington and Philadelphia. New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago becoming increasingly conscious of the necessity for adequate parkways and recreation centers, developed the terminal facilities of their railways and motor roads to care for the increased suburban commuting populations, many of whom traveled as much as 80 miles a day to and from work.