American recreation: Sportsmanship and the New Nationalism, 1900-1910

This article is about the relationship between the culture of outdoors recreation and the development of progressive politics at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. It considers the significance of popular outdoors magazines for American culture and politics before focussing in particular on the way in which Caspar Whitney, as editor of Outing magazine, constructed a notion of sportsmanship modelled upon the idealized figure of Theodore Roosevelt – an exemplar, by his reckoning, of the patrician class, and the template for his vision of a progressive citizenship. It was through the notion of sportsmanship that Whitney defined a set of values that would become synonymous with the strain of progressivism known as the New Nationalism, out of which the tradition of reform liberalism emerged in the twentieth century.