USA v. Spain, In the Stands

The U.S. Men's National Team faced 2010 World Cup Champion Spain this past weekend at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. The game was a disappointment for the United States, with Spain adroitly running circles around the U.S. team and winning 4-0. With 60, 000 in attendance, however, it was still a festive event. People like me have as much fun studying the crowd as the game.

The wearing of national flags is typical at international events, especially soccer and tennis. And I mean, literally, the wearing of a flag:

It's a powerful statement of national loyalty throughout the game, and, of course, comes in handy at moments of fervent cheering:

Fans on the Field

World Series, 1903

Huntington Ave Park, Boston, 1904

Ohio Football League Championship, 1906

Brookside Park, Cleveland, 1914

Stagg Field, Chicago, 1915. Chicago History Museum.

One of the things that impresses me most when I look at images of early sporting events is just how close the audience was to the field of play. While this is still generally true for amateur and college games, in professional sports, the grounds of play have become sacred; audiences cannot enter the space during game time without risking censure, arrest, or a heavy fine. In fact, when fans are allowed to cross the boundaries of the field, that act is always ritualized and marked as special; it's okay when a home team wins a championship, for example, or when one has paid a fee for a specially-guided tour.

But it wasn't always so. Look at these images. Before stadiums and bleachers organized the flow of sports crowds into designated areas, audiences tended to congregate as close as possible to the players. Especially in baseball, the audience helped to shape the field's broader outlines; in some games, fans were actually on what we could today consider the frame of the field. In all, fans' bodies, voices, and dynamic responses must have been a far more integral part of the game.

Yale Football Game, 1879

In football, around the turn of the century, it was decided that something had to be done about the crowds. As Walter Camp explained in his 1894 book, American Football, audiences were starting to create problems for the news kinds of highly-ruled play that had developed. In other words, they needed to be separated from the game:

To-day the teams which meet to decide the championship are brought up to the execution of at least twenty-five different plays, each of which is called for by a certain distinct signal of its own. The first signals given were “word signals;” that is, a word or a sentence called out so that the entire team might hear it and understand whether a kick or a run was to be made. Then, when signals became more general, “sign signals” (that is, some motion of the hand or arm to indicate the play) were brought in and became for a time more popular than the word signals, particularly upon fields where the audience pressed close upon the lines, and their enthusiastic cheering at times interfered with hearing word signals. Of late years numerical combinations have become most popular, and as the crowd is kept at such a distance from the side lines as to make it possible for teams to hear those signals, they have proven highly satisfactory… (120-121)

Compare these two images of the first Rose Bowl in 1902 and then the first game in the new Rose Bowl stadium in 1923:

The audience is bigger, obviously, but what's notable, I think, is the extent to which they have been moved, away from the field, up on grandstands, and behind barriers. I wonder what the relationship of this removal is to the late 19th century "disciplining of spectatorship" in theater and music, where audiences were asked to silently behold--or, at least, not interfere with--the unfolding of a work onstage? Or is this all simply progress--audiencing made more convenient, the field made visible to all, the game allowed to be played as a pure contest between teams?  

Panoramic Audiences

The "panorama," a wide all-encompassing view of a subject (usually a landscape or a battle), was a regular feature of urban popular culture for much of the 19th century. Panoramas were painted on wide and sometimes cylindrical canvases and some had mechanisms that allowed them to rotate, but all offered spectators the illusion of immersion in a scene. Once photography became more common in the late 19th century, more "realistic" panoramas of cities and national parks were created by placing several wide-angle shots side-by-side; by 1900, specially-designed panoramic cameras were used by professional photographers to depict large structures, geographical expanses, and groups of people.

Panoramic photographers seemed especially interested in the increasingly large audiences for political rallies, sporting events, and concerts at the turn of the century. A stadium or theater audience was difficult to reproduce with an ordinary camera, since it typically stretched beyond the viewing field. But the panoramic camera could capture the entire seating area of a hall or amphitheater (albeit with slight distortion). And by representing the whole of that audience from a fixed position, something that was not possible to the normal eye, the panorama artfully enhanced the audience's significance. Such photographs are an untapped resource for audience studies in terms of the detail they offer about performance spaces, as well as audience behavior, public decorum, and the vital role of spectators and listeners in American popular culture.

The Library of Congress has an excellent collection that is available online. A few samples of the photographs follow.

New Theatre, Chicago, 1906

President Wilson addressing Associated Ad Clubs, Independence Square, Philadelphia

Harvard-Dartmouth Game, 1903

Rubenstein Club, 1908

The next three are too big to depict properly, but the detail is amazing. You can find them here and here and here....

Squires-Burns Fight, 1907

Arbor Day 1908

President Taft, State Fair, Detroit, 1911

Audience Engineering

In the mid-19th century, the popularity of tours by European virtuoso performers (Fanny Elssler, Jenny Lind, Leopold de Meyer, Ole Bull, etc.) had promoters and city leaders scrambling to find venues large enough to accommodate the increasingly large audiences. Older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans typically had standing theaters or churches that could hold large numbers of people, but many towns and smaller cities had to improvise. Jenny Lind, to the embarrassment of genteel Boston observers, for example, performed in the Fitchburg, Massachusetts, railway station.

Mass meetings of all kinds soon became in demand. Audiences marvelled at the emotions created by huge crowds, especially in urban communities, where residents could suspend their normal isolation and anonymity and see themselves literally gathered, as a single entity. Boston’s National Peace Jubilee, for instance, developed by band leader Patrick Gilmore in 1869, to celebrate the end of the Civil War, was the largest single concert gathering in the United States, including an orchestra of 1,000 (along with a total of 11,000 singers) and an audience of 50,000, all in a temporary coliseum, constructed entirely out of wood.

Interior of the Coliseum of the 1869 National Peace Jubilee

In 1872, Gilmore did it again in the World Peace Jubilee. Architect William G. Preston redesigned the since demolished 1869 coliseum on an even bigger scale, with a seating capacity of 100,000 (and a 2,000-pice orchestra and a chorus of 20,000). 

At events like this, the thunder of applause was as interesting as any performer; indeed, the physicality of the moment created excitement out of risk as much as pleasure. Flyers for the 1869 Jubilee advertised "AN IMMENSE COLISEUM, The largest structure in America, capable of accommodating FIFTY THOUSAND PERSONS, has been erected especially for this occasion." And, as one writer said about the Peace Jubilee in 1872: “Not the least moral feature of the Festival is the applause,--so overwhelming in its demonstration that timid souls have said their prayers and trusted blindly in the stability of wooden rafters.”

Gilmore tried to downplay this risky excitement in his own accounts of the festivals, but clearly it was part of the appeal: “The builders, contractors, architects, and building committee were all gentlemen of great experience, and fully appreciated the responsibility of their task. They knew that the safety and security of Fifty Thousand lives were in their hands, and they took every precaution to guard against accident by making the structure strong and solid enough to bear ten times the weight and pressure to which it would ever be subjected…From morning till night, for weeks and months, the Building Committee, one or all, were almost constantly on the ground, watching every inch of progress made. Fully satisfied that everything possible was being done which the knowledge and experience of the builders and their own foresight could suggest to make the structure safe beyond a doubt, they turned a deaf ear to the malicious rumors that would have swept away all confidence…” (From Patrick Gilmore, History of the National Peach Jubilee and Great Musical Festival, 1871: 277).

Big audiences didn’t disappear—you start to see the impact of mass meetings and concerts, especially, in sports, where stadium construction increases to accommodate audiences for baseball and football. As an article from a gymnasium construction company states, "It is announced in the newspaper column that the Yale football management is to make determined effort to accommodate all the spectators who may wish to attend the Yale-Harvard football game this fall, a condition of affairs which has not existed in previous years. Some 4,000 additional seats are to be erected, giving the gridiron stands a seating capacity of about 31,000. The new stands will be so erected as to close the corners and fill in the sides. Comparison with the Harvard stadium, used for the first time last year, still shows a greater capacity at Cambridge. The Harvard stadium proper seats about 25,000 persons, but by means of additional stands 35,000 can be accommodated. (American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol 1, September 1904-August 1905. Boston: American Gymnasia Company: 11)

Temporary “stands” were one thing; it became clear by the 1890s that the lasting appeal of sports would require more scientific examination of how create solid, safe, and enduring audience structures. I’m only beginning the exploration of this particular science, but here’s a glimpse, from a paper on “live loads”—another term for audience!--delivered at the meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1904:

"It is freely admitted the writer’s results give figures greatly in excess of those given by the accepted authorities (outside of some municipal building laws), both in the United States and in Europe, but the experiment is one very easily tried by anyone who may feel unconvinced. Doubtless, mixed crowds of men and women, such as football spectators, may weigh less per square foot, with an equal degree of personal discomfort, than the body of students in the writer’s experiments. It should be remembered that a closely packed crowd is not likely to be in a mood to take calmly any undue deflection or appearance of weakness in the floor, and the result of such seeming insecurity is not pleasant to contemplate. In the writer’s opinion, such floors as those of passageways, corridors, standing-room in theaters, assembly rooms without fixed seats, ballrooms, etc., should be calculated for a weight closely approaching 150 lb. per sq. ft., or, in some cases even more, without exceeding the unit stresses of Mr. Schneider’s Paragraph 17. Possibly, a large standing assemblage, such as is common at political meetings, likely to applaud by stamping; or, a throng of dances; or a body of drilling soldier, might call for an additional impact provision."(C. C. Schneider, “The Structural Design of Buildings.” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Paper No. 997: 443-444)

An image from C. C. Schneider's 1904 paper on "live loads."