Baseball and the American Character

Baseball and the American Character

Introduction

The purpose of writing this paper is to give the readers an idea about the base ball and the love of Americans for the baseball. The main motive behind the paper is actually to illustrate that baseball is the Americans national game, thus the love for the game is unidentifiable and the sport is now the part of the American culture. Therefore, to give readers a better understanding, the author selected three different pieces of articles written by the renowned writers who focused on the importance of baseball in relation to the United States of American. The first article selected by the author is written by Guttman in 1978 by the title of “Why Baseball was our National Game”, the second paper selected by the author is written by Ross (1971) by the name of “Football Red and Baseball Green”, whereas the third and the last paper is written by Mandelbaum (2004) by the name of “Baseball: The remembrance of things past”. All the three articles selected by the author are outstanding work in terms of explaining the Americans love for the game.

Discussion

Why Baseball our National Game

Early in the nineteenth century, George Bancroft began to publish the first fully developed theory of American exceptionalism. His monumental History of the United States (1834-1875) presented a providential view of the American past. The United States had been destined by God to demonstrate to the world the moral and political superiority of democratic institutions. The observed difference between Europe and America was, therefore, part of a divine plan for the regeneration of the world through the agency of the common man. At the end of the century, Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) contributed mightily to the theme of American exceptionalism. His theory was secular and environmental, a kind of hymn nonetheless, a celebration of American democracy as the offspring of the frontier (Guttman, 1978). In Turner's view, the frontier acted as a crucible in which age-old European customs were burned away, in which the true metal of the American character was created.

Although the author is not ready to say that Americans have been drawn to baseball because of the persistence of myth in our collective unconscious, I am nonetheless convinced that pastoral traits are important to the game and that modern man is not totally untouched by the annual revitalization of the earth. If I am right about baseball, the primitive and pastoral elements cannot simply be forgotten at this point in our discussion merely because such forgetfulness may be convenient for the argument. If these elements are psychically important, they must be important to all men and not just to Americans and others who have taken up baseball. In that case, societies which do not have the game of baseball should have some equivalent with which to enact the rites of spring, with which to remind themselves of the eternal cycle of ...