The Resurrection of Sport and Spectacle in America
A New Thesis on 4,000 Years of the Fighting Instinct, the Puritan Suppression of the Body, and the Immigrant Resurrection That Built American Sporting Culture
Good morning. Thanks again for subscribing.
It’s been quiet on the publishing front lately. I’ve been busy growing the Goods Intelligence business, with new clients coming on board that have taken a lot of our bandwidth until we get settled in. And the boys have been off school for the two-week voorjaarsvakantie and we spent the last week skiing in the French and Italian Alps. Just got back Sunday.
A little-known fact about me is that I am a researcher and amateur historian, and have been for nearly twenty years.
My ancestral ties to American history run deep and in two directions at once. On one side, I am a descendant of families who were present at the American founding — a heritage I honored through my years on the board of the Sons of the Revolution, which owns the historic Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan. On the other, I am of relatively recent Irish and German immigrant descent, the grandson and great-great-grandson of immigrants who arrived in the great waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and built their lives in the industrial towns of northern New Jersey. I have lived on both sides of the Atlantic — in the US, where I was born and raised, and in Europe, where I now live — and that dual perspective has shaped how I think about the American story… from the inside and the outside simultaneously.
With the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States, I have wanted to contribute something to our historical record — something that has not been written before.
For the past twenty years I have been researching, and over the last several I have been seriously drafting, what has become a multi-volume series that blends American history with the sporting and immigrant experience. The center of that story — the lens through which it is told — is my great-great-grandfather, Patrick “Paddy” McGuigan, who was one of the greatest prizefighters in American history. Paddy was the lightweight boxing champion of both New York and New Jersey in the late 1800s, a man who went on to become one of the most influential sporting and cultural figures in America at the very moment that sport and spectacle were being resurrected on American soil. His story, and the world he inhabited, spans five volumes and more than half a million words, sourced from over two thousand primary documents — newspaper accounts, fight records, court records, census data, family oral history, and the archives of early papers like the National Police Gazette, the Newark Evening News, and the New York Times.
But as I wrote his story, I realized something was missing. The reader who picked up the first volume about Paddy McGuigan’s life would be dropped into a world — the saloons and prize rings and athletic clubs of 1880s New York and New Jersey — without understanding why that world existed. Why did American sporting culture emerge when it did, where it did, in the form it did? Why prizefighting? Why the saloon? Why in the New York-New Jersey metro? Why immigrants? Why then?
The answer to those questions became a book of its own.
If you’re interested in reading an early draft of this book or any of the other forthcoming volumes, please reach out. Below is a summary preview.
The Resurrection of Sport and Spectacle in America
The first book in this multi-volume world is called The Resurrection of Sport and Spectacle in America. It is a standalone work — a prologue that makes an argument I believe has not been made before in a single sustained narrative.
My argument is as follows:
The sporting instinct — especially that of fighting — and the spectacle instinct are human universals. They are present in every civilization, in every era, since the beginning of recorded history. In America, these instincts were systematically buried by the Puritan founding for two and a half centuries. They began cracking just before but were fully resurrected after the Civil War by the convergence of immigration, frontier expansion, urbanization, and the irrepressible pressure of the instinct itself — carried almost entirely by immigrants the nativist movement was trying to exclude. And the capital of that resurrection was the New York metropolitan ecosystem — which included, just as critically as Manhattan itself, the industrial towns of northern New Jersey that history has largely forgotten.
Let me trace the argument.
The Fighting Instinct
The book begins where it must — with the body. Combat sport is the ur-sport. It is the first organized physical contest that appears in every civilization’s record. Not running, not throwing, not team games. Fighting. The wrestling pairs carved into the walls of the tomb at Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt, dated to roughly 2000 BCE, constitute the oldest known depiction of organized sport — four thousand years old, and what they depict is two men grappling. The Sumerians wrestled. The Greeks built the pankration — a synthesis of boxing and wrestling with almost no rules — into the centerpiece of Olympia. The Romans elevated combat spectacle to a technology of governance with the gladiatorial arena. Every civilization that left a record left evidence of organized fighting, and in every case, it appears first — before chariot races, before ball games, before any other form of athletic competition. The instinct to fight is a human universal.
And so is the instinct to watch. The spectacle impulse — the gathering of a crowd to witness danger, physical mastery, and the possibility of death — appears alongside the fighting and sporting instinct in every civilization. Death is the original spectacle. The crowd gathers because the body in extremis asks questions that the body at rest cannot answer. The bullfight, the gladiatorial arena, the public execution, the prizefight — they are variations on a single theme: the human need to witness the body pushed to its limits, and to experience that witnessing communally, as a crowd.
The fighting instinct and the spectacle instinct are the same instinct viewed from opposite sides of the ring.
The European Inheritance
The book then traces the inheritance that would eventually come to America. The English prize ring — from James Figg’s amphitheatre in 1719 through Broughton’s Rules in 1743 to the London Prize Ring Rules of 1838 — created the institutional framework for organized boxing. But that inheritance carried a paradox baked into it from the start, which was that the same Reformation that liberated the European mind from the authority of Rome simultaneously imprisoned the European body. The Protestant Reformation was not merely a theological revolution, but a sensory one. The reformers stripped the churches — literally. The icons were smashed. The stained glass was broken. The vestments were burned. The instruments were banned from worship. The Mass, which had been the most elaborate theatrical performance most Europeans would ever witness — incense, vestments, chanting, the elevation of the Host — was replaced by the sermon… a man in a plain black robe talking. Sola scriptura — the Word alone — was a sensory principle as much as a theological one. The same instinct that whitewashed the cathedral walls would close the theatres.
And it would cross the Atlantic.
The Burial
The Puritans who founded New England brought with them the most comprehensive experiment in bodily regulation any civilization has ever attempted. Drawing on David Hackett Fischer’s foundational work in Albion’s Seed, the book traces the four British folkways that settled colonial America — and demonstrates that while only one of them (the Puritan) was explicitly hostile to the body at play, the cultural vocabulary of the Puritan founding became the dominant framework for the entire nation.
The evidence stretches across two centuries. In 1621, Plymouth Colony’s governor William Bradford stopped newcomers from playing “stoole ball and pitching the barr” on Christmas Day — the body at play treated as an offense against God on the holiest day of the Christian calendar. Massachusetts banned theatre in 1750. Rhode Island followed in 1762. Pennsylvania regulated public amusements repeatedly — 1700, 1706, 1713.
In 1774, the Continental Congress — which included Anglicans, Quakers, Dutch Reformed, and Cavalier planters from Virginia — passed a resolution suppressing “theatrical entertainments, horse racing, gaming, and such other diversions as are productive of idleness.”
Consider who was in that room. Virginia had a theatre in Williamsburg since 1716. Charleston had one since 1736. The Southern delegates came from cultures where spectacle was tolerated, even celebrated. And yet the resolution passed.
The cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky offered a framework for understanding why. It was what he called the doctrine of first effective settlement — the idea that the first group to establish viable institutions in a territory sets the cultural framework within which all subsequent arrivals must operate. The Puritans were that first group. Their cultural vocabulary had become so thoroughly embedded in the institutional language of the colonies that even men from non-Puritan traditions assented to the suppression of entertainments their own cultures had long enjoyed. The suppression of the body became the shared language of the American founding, regardless of denomination.
The result was a void — a sporting and spectacle void — unlike anything in the contemporary Western world. While London hosted six hundred to a thousand concerts per decade, while Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven were performing for the courts of Vienna, while the English prize ring was producing champions and the theatres were packing audiences nightly — America had almost nothing. The Puritans banned instruments from worship as the “Devil’s fiddle.” The first organ in a Puritan-heritage church did not appear until 1770, in Providence, Rhode Island. The first American secular songbook was not published until 1788. The first American piano music appeared in 1790. Thomas Jefferson played the violin alone at Monticello, in a nation that had no public concert culture to speak of.
The void was real. And it held for two and a half centuries.
The founding generation itself is the most powerful evidence of the void’s completeness. These were among the most brilliant, most physically courageous human beings of the eighteenth century. Several of them were genuine polymaths.
Yet not one of them had a sporting life.
John Adams stated it most explicitly: “I was not sent to this world to spend my days in sport, diversion and pleasure. I was born for business; for both activity and study.” And, more sharply: “Let others waste their bloom of life at the card or billiard table among rakes and fools.” Adams was a Puritan by inheritance and by temperament — the voice of the covenant speaking through the mouth of a man born a century and a half after Plymouth. He would have considered the question “What sport do you play?” incomprehensible.
Thomas Jefferson was a Virginian, a Cavalier by culture — a man who rode daily, walked obsessively, designed his own house, played the violin, and believed in the physical life of the gentleman farmer. He was the closest thing the founding generation had to a man of the body. And yet Jefferson’s physical life was entirely productive — walking, riding, farming, building. It was never competitive. He did not race. He did not wrestle. He did not attend sporting contests, because there were no sporting contests to attend. “Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise,” he wrote to a nephew. The advice is practical, sensible, and entirely devoid of play.
George Washington was the most physically imposing of the founders — six feet two in an era when the average man stood five-seven, a horseman of legendary skill, a man who survived bullets, disease, and eight years of war. And during the Revolution, when his soldiers wrestled, boxed, and played games in camp, Washington’s response was complaint, not celebration. He objected to soldiers playing “games of exercise” when they should have been drilling — the same categorical objection Bradford had articulated a century and a half earlier on Christmas Day in Plymouth.
And then there was Benjamin Franklin — and this is where the story becomes a little more personal because, as you know, this newsletter takes its name from an institution Franklin created.
Franklin was the most physically accomplished of all the founders. As a young man in London, he stripped off his clothes and swam nearly four miles down the Thames from Chelsea to Blackfriars, performing tricks and demonstrating strokes to the astonishment of onlookers. As a boy, he had invented his own swim paddles — oval wooden palettes with thumb holes, strapped to his hands to increase speed. He swam in the Schuylkill into his forties, in the Seine in his sixties, and fell asleep floating on his back in a salt-water bath in his seventies without sinking. In 1968, the International Swimming Hall of Fame inducted him — two centuries after his death.
Franklin was the anti-Puritan in his relationship to the body. He was instinctive, experimental, and joyful. And yet when he organized — when he turned his genius for institution-building toward collective life — the results were entirely intellectual. The Junto, his first and most beloved club, was a Friday-evening mutual improvement society. It had twelve members meeting in a tavern to discuss morals, politics, and natural philosophy. The Junto produced the first public lending library in America, the first volunteer fire company, and many other civic and cultural innovations. And in 1732, Franklin proposed something that reveals the depth of the void more starkly than any statute or sermon: “That once a Month in Spring, Summer and Fall the Junto meet of a Sunday in the Afternoon in some proper Place cross the River for Bodily Exercise.”
The man who would help draft the Declaration of Independence had to formally propose, in writing, that his friends cross a river and exercise together once a month. In any other civilization surveyed in this book — in Greece, in Rome, in the indigenous Americas, in the folk culture of the England the colonists had left — a group of men gathering for physical activity would have been so ordinary as to require no proposal at all. In Franklin’s America, gathering with friends to move your body on a Sunday afternoon was an innovation on par with founding a library.
And it left no trace. The library endured. The fire company endured. Whether the monthly river exercise became a sustained practice is unclear — it appears nowhere in Franklin’s Autobiography. Franklin could swim four miles down the Thames.
America could not give him anywhere to race.
The Champion Who Proved the Void
The book devotes a chapter to Tom Molineaux — the first American-born athlete to claim a national championship in any sport. Molineaux was born into slavery in Virginia, won his freedom through prizefighting, and sailed to England in 1809 because there was no prize ring in America for him to fight in. In England, he challenged and nearly defeated Tom Cribb, the English heavyweight champion, in two legendary bouts. The double irony is devastating. The first two notable American-born athletes — Molineaux and his mentor Bill Richmond, “the Black Terror,” born on Staten Island — were both Black, both born into slavery, and both had to leave the country to find a fight. America’s sporting void was so complete that its best fighters had to cross an ocean to compete.
The Erosion
This void did not shatter overnight. It eroded — from three directions simultaneously.
First, immigration. The demographic transformation of the United States between 1820 and 1860 was staggering… the population grew from 3.9 million to 31.4 million, with five million immigrants arriving in those four decades. The Irish Famine immigrants of the 1840s constituted the largest group of refugees from a single source the United States has ever absorbed relative to its population. They brought not merely a fighting culture — the faction fight, the fair-day brawl, the physical contest as a mode of community identity — but Catholic spectacle… the Mass, the vestments, the incense, the icons. Everything the Reformation had stripped from the churches was walking off the boats. The nativist backlash was as theological as it was ethnic or economic. The burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1834 was an attack on the return of everything the Reformation had tried to destroy — a double affront to the Puritan suppression of the body and the Puritan suppression of spectacle.
Second, the frontier. As Americans pushed west, they left the Puritan framework behind. Fort Worth in the 1870s had nine churches and sixty saloons. The Gold Rush of 1849 created instant cities with no inherited moral infrastructure. The frontier saloon — with its gambling, drinking, fighting, and spectacle — was the meeting house inverted, and the culture it produced would eventually migrate back east.
Third, urbanization. The cities were growing too fast for the old framework to govern. The Bowery Theatre in New York seated four thousand. Barnum’s American Museum opened at Broadway and Ann Street in 1842. Minstrelsy — born in Bowery taverns in the 1830s — became a national entertainment form by the 1840s. The demographic pressure was simply too great for the Puritan cultural vocabulary to contain.
And through it all, the prize ring was building its own lineage — illegally, on the jurisdictional margins, on islands in rivers and bluffs above state lines. Tom Hyer. John Morrissey. John C. Heenan. The Elysian Fields in Hoboken, where the first organized baseball game was played in 1846. The New Jersey border geography — close enough to New York to draw the crowd, far enough across the water to evade its law — was already shaping the story.
The Crucible
The Civil War gathered three million men and shattered every suppression the previous chapters describe. The scale was unprecedented: 620,000 dead, two-thirds from disease, in a nation of thirty-one million. The immigrant composition of the armies — 200,000 Germans, 150,000 Irish, 45,000 English, 180,000 African Americans — meant the war was fought substantially by the communities that had been carrying the sporting and spectacle culture the Puritan framework was trying to suppress.
In the camps, the suppression collapsed completely. Men boxed, wrestled, played baseball, gambled at cards and dice, drank despite restrictions, and frequented prostitutes in numbers that forced the Union Army to take the extraordinary step of licensing brothels in Nashville and Memphis in 1863–1865 — the Union Army, fighting to preserve the Republic the Puritans had helped found, operating state-sanctioned brothels. The camp was the comprehensive undoing of the Puritan body.
And the rifled musket destroyed something else. It destroyed the line formation that had governed battlefield tactics since the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment had liberated the mind while demanding total bodily submission on the battlefield — soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, firing in volleys, absorbing casualties without breaking. The rifled musket made the line suicidal. Both the Northern suppression of the body and the Southern exploitation of it — the slave system that had treated the Black body as property — were destroyed simultaneously. The frameworks that had governed the American body for two and a half centuries did not survive the war.
The Reconciliation and the Resurrection
The post-war chapters trace how the forces scattered by the war reassembled into something new. Baseball — the game that had spread through army camps on both sides — became the vehicle of national reconciliation. The Cincinnati Red Stockings toured the country undefeated in 1869. The National League was founded in 1876. In that same year of 1869, the first intercollegiate football game in American history was played at New Brunswick, New Jersey — Rutgers versus the College of New Jersey, under association football rules — another sport born on New Jersey soil.
The heavyweight championship lineage continued through the 1870s — Coburn, McCoole, Mace, Allen, Goss, Ryan — contested entirely by immigrants, recognized by no governing body, declared by newspapers and claimed by fighters themselves. The entire championship structure of American prizefighting was an informal commercial enterprise, run by the men who profited from it… the promoters, the handlers, and the editors who sold papers by declaring winners and losers. Richard Kyle Fox, the Irish immigrant who transformed the National Police Gazette into the first national sporting publication, was the closest thing to an authority — and he was a newspaper proprietor, not a regulator. His power was commercial, not institutional.
The Queensberry Rules, drafted in London in 1865 and published in 1867, introduced the glove — and with it, a paradox the book develops at length. Bare fists had protected the brain… the hand breaks before the skull, which meant bare-knuckle fighters instinctively limited their force to the head. Gloves removed that restraint. A gloved fist could strike the skull repeatedly without breaking, delivering far more cumulative damage to the brain. The reform that made boxing look civilized made it more dangerous. The padded glove was the instrument of brain injury, not the bare fist.
By the early 1880s, two men emerged who embodied the resurrection.
John L. Sullivan — born in Boston to Irish immigrant parents from Kerry and Roscommon — defeated Paddy Ryan in nine rounds in Mississippi in 1882 to claim the heavyweight championship of America, then toured the continent by train in 1883–84, fighting 195 fights in 136 cities over 238 days. Sullivan carried the resurrection across the country in his fists.
Charlie Norton — born in Birmingham, England, the lightweight champion of America, Sullivan’s own trainer and sparring partner — settled in Newark, New Jersey, and opened the Police Gazette Shades, a franchise saloon in Fox’s national network. Norton later opened his own place — Norton’s, on Plane Street — which became the crucible of Newark boxing, the training ground for the next generation of fighters. For two years, 1882 to 1884, the heavyweight and lightweight champions of America were collaborators — the Irishman and the Englishman, the two immigrant traditions that had built the American prize ring.
And in the same West Hudson, New Jersey towns where Norton trained fighters, the Clark Thread Company of Paisley, Scotland, was drawing thousands of Scottish workers to Kearny. Those workers formed a soccer team in 1883 — Clark O.N.T. — that won the first three American Football Association Cup championships. On Thanksgiving Day 1885, the first international soccer match on American soil was played at Clark Field in East Newark. The West Hudson towns were producing not one resurrection but several, in the same few square miles.
The Capital of the Resurrection
The resurrection happened everywhere — in the river towns of the Mississippi, in the mining camps of Nevada, in the frontier saloons Sullivan visited on his tour, in the Deep South where he knocked out Ryan on former Confederate soil. But the center of gravity was the industrial corridor that ran from lower Manhattan across the Hudson into the factory towns of northeastern New Jersey.
Northern New Jersey was not — as the modern reader might assume — a bedroom community for New York. It was one of the most concentrated manufacturing corridors in the world. Newark alone was called “the Birmingham of America.” Seth Boyden had opened the nation’s first malleable iron foundry there. By 1860, ninety percent of all patent leather produced in the United States came from Newark’s tanneries. By 1892, Newark was the fourth-largest city in the country by manufacturing output. Thomas Edison worked in Newark in the early 1870s before moving to Menlo Park. Prudential Insurance was founded there in 1873. Paterson — Alexander Hamilton’s own experiment in American industrialization — was the silk capital of the nation, home to Rogers Locomotive Works, which built more than six thousand locomotives. Harrison, barely a square mile on the Passaic River, housed Worthington Pump, Otis Elevator, and the Edison Lamp Works, where the incandescent light bulb was commercialized at scale beginning in 1882.
And critically, no bridge or tunnel connected New Jersey to Manhattan during the entire period the book describes. The rail tunnels under the Hudson did not open until 1910. The Holland Tunnel opened in 1927. The George Washington Bridge in 1931. For the whole of the nineteenth century, the only way across the river was by boat. The Hudson was not merely a geographic boundary — it was a jurisdictional one. Prizefighting was illegal in New York, and the New York police enforced the law aggressively. New Jersey’s enforcement was different — local, uneven, often indifferent. A promoter could stage a fight in Harrison, draw his audience from Manhattan by ferry, and operate across a state line. The same geography that had made Weehawken a dueling ground in 1804 made the West Hudson towns an essential part of the prizefighting ecosystem eighty years later. It was close enough to draw the New York crowd, far enough across the water to evade the New York authorities.
This was the geography of the first baseball game at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken. The first intercollegiate football game at New Brunswick. The first international soccer match at Clark Field. The first anti-prizefighting statute after the Weehawken fights. The saloon on Market Street where a retired English lightweight champion opened a franchise of the nation’s first sporting publication. No comparable concentration of sporting firsts existed anywhere else in the country.
The resurrection was national. Its capital was the New York metropolitan corridor — and the New Jersey side of that corridor, the side history has overlooked, is where the second book will begin.
What Comes Next
The Resurrection of Sport and Spectacle in America ends in the early 1880s, at the moment when all the forces the book has traced — the fighting instinct, the spectacle instinct, the immigrant inheritance, the Puritan collapse, the post-war convergence — have assembled into a functioning sporting and spectacle culture. The saloon has replaced the meeting house. The fighter has replaced the minister as the hero of the working-class neighborhood. The prize ring has champions, a sporting press, and a commercial infrastructure generating more money than the old framework’s defenders can suppress.
The story of what happened next — told through the life of my great-great-grandfather Paddy McGuigan, a man who fought in this world, promoted it, profited from it, and was shaped by it for half a century — begins in the next volumes. It begins in Newark, in the room on Plane Street where a retired English champion trained the fighters who would carry the resurrection forward. It begins in Harrison, across the Passaic, in the industrial town where the Irish and the English and the Germans lived side by side and built the most extraordinary sporting culture the world had ever seen.
The instinct that was buried for two and a half centuries was free. What came next was the golden age of sports and spectacle.
If you’re interested in reading an early draft of this book or any of the other forthcoming volumes, please reach out.