Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sports Story

By Ryan K. Anderson

Gilbert Patten, writing as Burt L. Standish, made a career of generating serialized twenty-thousand-word stories featuring his fictional creation Frank Merriwell, a student athlete at Yale University who inspired others to emulate his example of manly boyhood. Patten and his publisher, Street and Smith, initially had only a general idea about what would constitute Merriwell’s adventures and who would want to read about them when they introduced the hero in the dime novel Tip Top Weekly in 1896, but over the years what took shape was a story line that capitalized on middle-class fears about the insidious influence of modern life on the nation’s boys.

Merriwell came to symbolize the Progressive Era debate about how sport and school made boys into men. The saga featured the attractive Merriwell distinguishing between “good” and “bad” girls and focused on his squeaky-clean adventures in physical development and mentorship. By the serial’s conclusion, Merriwell had opened a school for “weak and wayward boys” that made him into a figure who taught readers how to approximate his example.

In Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood, Anderson treats Tip Top Weekly as a historical artifact, supplementing his reading of its text, illustrations, reader letters, and advertisements with his use of editorial correspondence, memoirs, trade journals, and legal documents. Anderson blends social and cultural history, with the history of business, gender, and sport, along with a general examination of childhood and youth in this fascinating study of how a fictional character was used to promote a homogeneous “normal” American boyhood rooted in an assumed pecking order of class, race, and gender.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: Sep 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781610755719

Book preview

Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood

The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sport Story

Ryan K. Anderson

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS

FAYETTEVILLE

2015

Copyright © 2015 by The University of Arkansas Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

978-1-55728-682-6 (paper)

978-1-61075-571-9 (e-book)

19    18    17    16    15        5     4     3    2    1

Text design by Ellen Beeler.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015943113

To Jerry and Mary Ann’s middle child, with love

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Merry’s Flock

Part One

Chapter One: Building Will-power

Chapter Two: An American and Up to Date Boys’ Story

Part Two

Chapter Three: The Yale Spirit

Chapter Four: She Is . . . My Queen!

Chapter Five: Dick Is Tin

Chapter Six: Merriwell’s American School of Athletic Development

Epilogue: Merriwell Stuff

Appendix: The Works of Gilbert Patten, Street and Smith Titles, and Other Dime Novels

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Series Editor’s Preface

Sport is an extraordinarily important phenomenon that pervades the lives of many people and has enormous impact on society in an assortment of different ways. At its most fundamental level, sport has the power to bring people great joy and satisfy their competitive urges while at once allowing them to form bonds and a sense of community with others from diverse backgrounds and interests and various walks of life. Sport also makes clear, especially at the highest levels of competition, the lengths that people will go to achieve victory as well as how closely connected it is to business, education, politics, economics, religion, law, family, and other societal institutions. Sport is, moreover, partly about identity development and how individuals and groups, irrespective of race, gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic class, have sought to elevate their status and realize material success and social mobility.

Sport, Culture, and Society seeks to promote a greater understanding of the aforementioned issues and many others. Recognizing sport’s powerful influence and ability to change people’s lives in significant and important ways, the series focuses on topics ranging from urbanization and community development to biographies and intercollegiate athletics. It includes both monographs and anthologies that are characterized by excellent scholarship, accessible to a wide audience, and interesting and thoughtful in design and interpretations. Singular features of the series are authors and editors representing a variety of disciplinary areas and who adopt different methodological approaches. The series also includes works by individuals at various stages of their careers, both sport studies scholars of outstanding talent just beginning to make their mark on the field and more experienced scholars of sport with established reputations.

In Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood, Ryan K. Anderson brings to life the popular stories of Frank Merriwell, the fictional schoolboy athlete who was followed by a great many loyal readers during the Progressive Era. Created by Gilbert Patten (under the pen name Burt L. Standish) and appearing in the Smith and Street dime novel Tip Top Weekly (1896–1912), the Merriwell stories recount the adventures of the Ivy Leaguer, Yale to be exact, who exemplified the best characteristics of an American boy. Displaying a thorough knowledge of boy’s sport fiction and through an exploration of the interconnection among Street and Smith publishing, Patten, and readers, Anderson makes clear that Merriwell was the idealized version of the manly boy in that he was at once physically gifted, intelligent, morally upright, selfless, honest, hard working, handsome, and inspirational. Importantly, this image of the idealized American boy eventually ceased to be a central tenet of American progressives, and Merriwell became the average all-American boy and altered the belief of many regarding an accepted model of boyhood.

David K. Wiggins

Acknowledgments

I will happily spend the rest of my life paying back the debts I racked up during the course of this project. Any shortcomings in this work are entirely mine.

An enormous thank you goes to the archival staffs that I worked with over the course of this project. Staff at the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Literature Research Collections allowed me the rare opportunity to make the thousands of paper copies that make up my private collection of Tip Top Weekly issues. Without setting aside a copy machine for my use (eight hours a day for three and a half days!) and at their great inconvenience and expense, I would not have been able to undertake this project. At Bowling Green State University’s Ray and Pat Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies, the staff welcomed me on multiple trips and has proved essential in securing digital images for use in this book—thank you, Nancy Downs and staff. Thanks to the folks at the University of Arkansas, Special Collections, Rare Books and Special Libraries at Mullins Library; Brandeis University’s Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections; the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections Department at Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; the University of Delaware’s Special Collections Room at Hugh M. Morris Library; the Denver Public Library’s Western History-Genealogy Department; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Room and the Manuscript Division; the National Museum of American History; the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Rare Book Room; New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections; Purdue University’s Hicks Undergraduate Library (Hi, Dot!); Syracuse University’s Special Collections Research Center, E. S. Bird Library; and Yale University’s Bienecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was my great pleasure to visit and work with you all. Special thanks to Diane Cotts at the University of Oklahoma Press for hunting up and providing illustrations used in Frank Merriwell’s Father: An Autobiography, by Gilbert Patten (Burt L. Standish) that are reproduced here with permission.

One of the great pleasures of researching this book was finding (literally and figuratively) other people who were just as excited about sharing Merriwell with a larger audience. Very special thanks to John Levi Cutler’s family. In a great show of confidence, Ann Cutler, his wife, and Carolyn Cutler, his daughter, sent me papers that made up the correspondence with Gilbert Patten he used when writing the only biography of the author (these are now at Syracuse University with the Street and Smith Editorial Records). Edward LeBlanc and Gerald Macintosh did pioneering bibliographic work on Merriwell that made my work possible. Randy Cox, the dean of dime novels, sat down with me one afternoon for a long conversation about Merriwell and Street and Smith. Bouncing my ideas off him informally was a great help, as was his reference work, The Dime Novel Companion.

I benefited from monetary support along the way. Early on, the Purdue University Department of History funded initial research trips with money from the Harold Woodman Graduate Research Fund. The Purdue Research Foundation awarded me multiple summer grants and year-long grants that supported the cost of research and writing for two years. The Horatio Alger Society awarded a Horatio Alger Fellowship for the Study of American Popular Culture that funded most of the research I did at Northern Illinois University. At my current academic home, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, the history department has awarded reassigned course time to free up writing and revision at crucial moments, and the Teaching and Learning Center awarded both a Mid-Career Faculty Support Initiative HOPES Program Grant and a Summer Research Fellowship.

Without a doubt a score of mentors shaped this book. My first and most important debt is to Kathleen Berkley of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington Department of History. She was the one who encouraged me to pursue Merriwell as a topic when I wrote about Patten in her graduate seminar, Writers as Social Critics. Her enthusiasm for the project in its first stage was a powerful motivator. I enjoyed my association with other professors there too; John Haley, Melton McLaurin, Alan Watson, Chris Fonville, and David LaVere were all instrumental in pushing me forward. I will always appreciate the opportunity the scholars in UNC-Wilmington’s history department gave me as a student in their MA program. Purdue University’s Department of History was a wonderful home as a doctoral student. I benefited from working with an excellent advisor, Elliott Gorn, a real mensch who never treated me as a student, but as a junior colleague. Nancy Gabin, Randy Roberts, and John Larson formed an exemplary body of readers. As a group, they did much to help me think about how I would take this work to book manuscript. Courses and conversations with Susan Curtis, Ariel de la Fuente, James Farr, Michael Morrison, and A. Whitney Walton sharpened my thinking about history, gender, and culture.

Many colleagues and friends helped out in a number of ways. Jenny Edwards, Craig Dosher, Sue Cody, Andrew Duppstadt, Michele Patterson, Renee Searfoss, Cullen Chandler, Andrew Bush, Jim Buss, Jim Williams, Eric Hall, Micah Childress, Matt Magruder, Adam Criblez, Mark Edwards, Rick Bradley, Ted Blanton, Ryan Dearinger, Amy Dean, Scott Randolph, and Zach Lechner all lent advice and their ears early on and continue to do so. Plus, they are good people whose friendship and camaraderie embellish my professional life. I doubt that I will ever have drinking buddies or play softball with people equal to the members of History’s Mysteries. David Welky read early revisions of this work and suggested organizing it along the lines that it is in now. Thanks, sir. I owe you. As I was leaving Purdue University, I had the good fortune to be accepted into a circle of recent hires at that school that did much to help me transition into life as a professor. Thanks again, Darren Dochuk, Mike Ryan, Stacy Holden, and Juan Wang. At the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, I have found a supportive group in the Department of History. Hearty thanks to the folks in our writing group—Jaime Martinez and Rose Stremlau’s criticism, applause, and suggestions have made this a much stronger work. Three for three isn’t bad, ya’ll! Applause for Charles Beem, Jeff Frederick, Weston Cook, and Scott Billingsley, all of whom read portions of the manuscript. Thanks to David Synan for his help during a late-project research trip to DC; what he lacks in experience as a research assistant he makes up for in wit and packing advice. Sometimes he asks good questions.

Countless people have talked with me about Merriwell at academic conferences during the past several years. Many thanks to commentators, co-panelists, and audience members at the following conferences: the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Houston, Texas, February 2011; the Business History Conference Annual Meeting, Athens, Georgia, March 2010; the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association 30th Anniversary Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2009; the Winton M. Blount Symposium on Postal History, Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Washington, DC, November 2006; the Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America Conference at the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, September 2006; Society for the History of Childhood and Youth Annual Meeting, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 2005; American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington, January 2005. Thanks also to the good people at the University of Arkansas Press: Larry Malley, Mike Bieker, Brian King, and the Sport, Culture, and Society Series editor, David Wiggins, Melissa Ann King, and David Scott Cunningham. Thanks also to the people who anonymously read and commented on my submission for the press. Laura Helper-Ferris, you are one great developmental editor and contributed much—hope we can work together again.

Ideas sometimes come from unusual places. Many, many thanks to Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, Brad Morgan, Jason Isbell, Shonna Tucker, John Neff, and Jay Gonzalez. The ongoing and evolving rawk show provided much of the soundtrack to this ongoing and evolving work of history. Also to Micah Schnabel, Shane Sweeney, and David Murphy. Self-preservation, indeed. I kept my antenna up, and all of you said something that clicked a tumbler in my mind at some point.

My family has always been a source of inspiration. My earliest history lessons came from listening to my grandparents Elmer and Zana Willman and Ralph and Dorothy Anderson talk about life in rural Arkansas during the Depression, Second World War, and the fifties and sixties. Early in life I knew that history was something people lived, rather than read from a book. My parents, David Anderson and Susan Anderson, and my brother Matthew Anderson (and now his wife, Coleen, and daughter Luella) have always supported me in my intellectual pursuits. Married life has only expanded my circle of supporters. Chandra Krintz and Rich Wolski are exemplary models of success in the academe; Jedd and Melissa Krintz have provided essential getaways from writing and teaching. Maxwell (an all-American boy of his own stripe) and Marianne (who need be neither Inza nor Elsie) have lent added personal meaning to Merriwell’s story. John Humperdink Stover III and Private Scooter Magruder have been with me from the beginning—they are both great listeners. Finally, and most importantly, my greatest everlasting debt is to Kristen Anderson; a voice of reason, interested reader and illustration assistant, muse, and the middle child to whom this book is dedicated.

Introduction

MERRY’S FLOCK

Frank Merriwell, the Progressive Era’s most popular fictional schoolboy athlete, demonstrated that a manly boy was moral, but no mollycoddle. His creator, Gilbert Patten (writing as Burt L. Standish), often had him face the decision between fitting in with his Yale cohort and sticking to his principles. Doing so earned him a legion of readers who followed Merriwell on the pages of Street and Smith’s dime novel, Tip Top Weekly (1896–1912), making it the most popular dime novel of its day. Collectively known as Merry’s flock, Street and Smith, Patten, and readers reveled in the hero’s weekly adventures.¹

Once, in an issue entitled Frank Merriwell’s Victory; or, The Winning Oar, three classmates named Lucy Little, Silas Blossom, and Bandy Robinson burst into Merriwell’s room on York Street where he, Harry Rattleton, and Dismal Jones were talking. The trio wanted to run the nearly three miles to West Rock and steal a turkey (this was something the Yale University students tried occasionally; last year’s freshmen were caught and nearly expelled); they would return, cook the bird, drink beer, and smoke cigars until the early morning hours. Merriwell, who was in for honest sport, but . . . did not fancy the idea of stealing, found himself caught between his boyish love of fun and acceptance and knowing he could not break the law. The others assumed he would not join in because, unlike many other Yale students, he avoided drinking, smoking, and cursing. Yet, he not only went but also masterminded the tomfoolery.²

The quintet took a moderately paced run out of town because Merriwell thought they should save their legs for a potentially mad sprint back to the boardinghouse. They stopped at the property of a Farmer Baldwin and surveyed the layout. Merriwell organized the team so they could steal the turkeys, keep a lookout, and ward off his dog should it attack. While they waited to begin, Robinson commented to Rattleton that the fellows would like [Merriwell] better if he would break over once in while and questioned his manliness. But Rattleton, who knew him as a roommate and teammate on the freshman class football team, stoutly disagreed because he knew Merriwell did not have to act bad to prove his manliness. His was the correct assessment. Merriwell was the only one who snagged a bird; the others lit out for home after the farmer set his dog on them and appeared with a gun. Not only did the boy hang onto his loot while evading a blast from a trip-wired shotgun, he also outran an adult interloper upon his return to York Street in New Haven without giving up his comrades’ location. Once the party was underway—Merriwell ate, told jokes, and led a sing-a-long, but abstained from beer and cigars—he revealed that he had left a five-dollar bill for the farmer so that they could not be accused of stealing and set aside leftovers for the boardinghouse mistress so she would forgive them for making noise during their late-night revelry. The other boys were astounded with his running ability and how he found a way to stick by his principles while acting like one of the guys. His supporters on campus grew by three that night as he proved he was the best example of an American boy.³

Merriwell led a life filled with fun, friends, and sport, but his balance underscored his popularity. He was handsome but not vain; an Ivy Leaguer with a common touch; an individual but not self-interested; a physical specimen with a sound mind; a talented youth with a solid work ethic; desirable to girls and relatively chaste; the type of person who both inspired good people and either converted bad people from their ruinous habits, or helped protect society from their harmful machinations. He always won in the end, but remained likable. Clearly, his was an idealized existence.

This book explains how Merriwell remade American boyhood for the twentieth century. It does so by exploring the interaction between Street and Smith publishing, Gilbert Patten, and the readers. The flock constituted an imagined community of people who were invested in Tip Top’s success and in making Merriwell into an ideal boy. Each week Patten brought Merriwell’s adventures to life, working with and against the flock’s other members while defining what was meant by manly boyhood, a period in life that prepared boys for a civilized manhood. The result was a story that insisted Merriwell and his schoolmates maintained a sense of autonomy while living in a school environment that let them play sports, acquire an education, and form important social bonds without direct adult influence. In the process, the Merriwell saga established the American schoolboy sports story, which was supposed to help Merry’s flock sort the deserving from the undeserving and, in the process, have women, people of color, and members of the working class accept social roles in relation to manly boyhood. At the outset, the Merriwell saga was not a boys’ story, but one for people interested in boys’ evolving social role. As Tip Top unspooled its hero’s adventures one after another; the impossibility of defining clearly who could and could not live up to the ideal of manly boyhood became apparent. So, rather than write a story that appealed to different people in different ways, Street and Smith began portraying its typical reader as a boy with middle-class values who wanted to succeed in life and knew playing sports was part of the process. Even though Tip Top’s middle-class boy reader was as fictional as Merriwell, he quit serving as the rallying point for a group of progressives and became someone only white middle-class boys could approximate. No longer an ideal American, the Progressive Era’s greatest fictional athlete became the average all-American boy and redefined what many people thought of as a normal boyhood.

Tip Top’s run took Street and Smith through a period of transition in American publishing and secured the company’s future. When the 1890s opened the company was a junior member of the Big Five—the most successful dime novel publishers. They published fiction in two types of periodical publications. Story papers like the company’s only regular title, the New York Weekly, grew out of the antebellum penny press and featured serialized stories, poems, and human-interest filler material for general audiences. They included some original material, but also reprinted stories—taking them from other publishers without paying for rights. Dime novels, which Street and Smith sold without much success, dated to the 1860s and featured a complete paper-covered one-hundred-page story. They cost as little as a nickel and traveled via second-class mail. Each installment had a common name, like Beadle’s Dime Novel, but featured a different story each week. Dime novel publishers were named for this format, but they used both types of periodicals as vehicles for selling as many copies of stories as possible. Their material was either commissioned or taken and reprinted from other publishers. Reprinting serialized stories that ran in story papers as complete stories in dime novels encouraged multiple purchases and was a popular way of expanding sales in a business based on circulation revenue. Street and Smith had sold the same types of titles since its founding. When twenty-seven-year-old Ormond Smith and his twenty-nine-year-old brother George Smith took over in 1887, they immediately introduced five new dime novel titles with distinct topical foci and a new juvenile story paper.⁴

The house trend toward titles for broad audiences mimicked the publishing field’s turn toward a specialized catalogue of publications sold within a rationalized market. During the Gilded Age, interrelated economic, technological, social, and cultural developments made the literary business intensely competitive and cutthroat. Evolutions in retail, postal regulation, and international copyright all lent to the division of the publishing business into distinct book, magazine, and newspaper fields with subfields inside of each grouping, as well as the creation of oligopolies within the publishing business. Divisions were meant to stabilize publishing by clearly defining who could sell what, to whom, and how, and to eliminate companies incapable of operating fairly. But organizing the publishing business made reprinting either cost prohibitive or illegal (depending on a company’s acquisition tactics), which in turn rendered dime novels and story papers less profitable. Indeed, the attack on wholesale reprinting necessitated changes in the dime novel field.⁵

Having few ties to tradition, Ormond Smith and George Smith explored new ways of making money in response to the publishing business’s rationalization. Along with new dime novel titles and a new story paper, they began using two emergent formats to generate stories legally and with maximum profitability. The library—later known as and referred to here as the weekly—emerged in the late 1870s when dime novel publishers adapted to changes in postal law and the downturn in story paper circulation. They were sixteen, thirty-two, or sixty-four pages long; offered a serialized story on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis; and cost either a nickel or a dime, depending on length and whether the audience was conceived of as juvenile or adult. Publishers periodically collected and repackaged installments from the weeklies in what modern collectors call thick books. Forerunners to the twentieth-century paperback novel, thick books appeared in paper and cloth editions and cost anywhere from approximately a quarter to a dollar and a quarter.⁶ Libraries often featured a reoccurring franchise character and generated the stories that appeared in thick books. Tip Top and Merriwell were Street and Smith’s first real successes at creating a title and character that attracted and retained readers while creating fiction that the publishing house could use to maximize its profit. Still, the title was more than a literary commodity readers consumed; it was something everyday people retained and worked with. Making Tip Top useful meant that Street and Smith needed Gilbert Patten to find and engage Merriwell’s audience.⁷

Tip Top and Merriwell changed Gilbert Patten’s life in the process. He grew up during the decades after the Civil War in a home that clung to republican values. But, he and his cadre grew up in a rural Maine that no longer bound their future opportunities to following their elders’ example. He could leave and find opportunities that had not existed for his father, and he found he would have to become different from the type of man his parents envisioned. Doing so—becoming a successful writer and a modern man—was difficult. His early adulthood was marked by failure.

Patten began writing the Merriwell saga at a time when middle-class Americans worried about changes in the rules governing how their sons became men. Nineteenth-century families released their five-year-old sons into the wilds of boy culture; there they mimicked an idealized version of their fathers’ democracy. Boys’ formal educations came in common schools and academies that affirmed they were who they needed to be as men. Then, industrial capitalism eroded the trust that let people assume their boys would grow into respectable men. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall and his followers began arguing that maturation was a biological directive one could manipulate; so an array of institutional influences arose that created environments away from home where middle-class boys could develop their best traits.⁸ Childhood and adolescence became distinct periods of development, elongated in duration, and were increasingly regulated by adults. Child experts told boys: The projectile power of your ambition depends wholly on the vigor of the determination behind it. What you accomplish will depend on the amount of life energy, of enthusiasm and will power you put into your efforts to achieve.⁹ But, boys found that using their projectile power was not so easy because schools, the universal source of adult authority away from home, were more concerned with granting academic credentials and teaching conformity than fostering independence.¹⁰ Boys were in a bind. They were expected to develop traits that made their elders trust them to act as good men, but proving they deserved manly rights meant remaining dependent on adults for a longer period of time. Tip Top was part of the answer. Patten and Street and Smith needed each other, but they both needed help positioning themselves as child experts who helped Americans understand how boys could navigate the irony of adolescence at the century’s turn.¹¹

Tapping into contemporary concerns about boyhood meant Patten and his editors needed information about the readership’s interests. Applause—a column featuring reader missives regarding the serial’s progress and editorial responses—gave Merriwell’s followers a way of commenting on the story and telling the people who made the saga what they thought about the story. This meant that over the dime novel’s run reader letters influenced, but did not dictate, the story’s direction as Patten tried to keep them interested. Engaging in a dialogue about what made Merriwell manly became a way Tip Top’s audience claimed respect.¹²

At the same time, the single most difficult aspect of responding to the readership’s wants was its breadth. Letters to Applause made it clear that Tip Top’s audience cut a wide swath across American society. For example, Edward Whissel, of Buffalo, New York, wrote in at age seventeen praising Standish’s ability and Tip Top’s quality and utility for the boy on the make. A decade later he was a married father of a toddler working as a bookkeeper for an automobile manufacturer.¹³ He was joined by James Lennan of Des Moines, Iowa, a son of Irish immigrants, who wrote at eighteen along with two of his friends, Arthur Upman and Clyde McConnel, saying only that they hoped the dime novel stayed in print for a long time.¹⁴ Bessie Blake, a twenty-one-year-old girl renting a room from Minnie Murphy on Ontario Street in Cleveland, Ohio, wrote to the weekly. Little is known about her occupation, but her bartender, actor, firemen, and day-laborer neighbors suggest she was either not necessarily among the city’s most respectable citizens or scraping along as a poorly paid clerk or domestic. She praised Standish’s character-drawing abilities and asked if any other readers would write and send her a copy of the issue with a letter in it from the boy from Italy who was interested in butterflies.¹⁵ The list of types of people who read and commented on Tip Top went on and on—nonwhites, adults, non-Americans, urban and rural people. It was impossible to please all these readers.¹⁶

Together, Street and Smith, Patten, and readers made Merriwell into a transitional figure that took nineteenth-century ideas about success and refashioned them into a manly boyhood that was both refreshingly new and comfortingly familiar. Sometimes their interests overlapped; sometimes they were in conflict. In creating Merriwell, they echoed the sentiments of early twentieth-century social and cultural pluralists who saw the nation as a federation of ethnic groups and pluralism as a way of fostering assimilation. Both John Dewey and Merry’s flock would have agreed on a basic principle that protected both individualism and secured social cohesion: all true Americans deserve autonomy, but only if we all agree on what preserves that right and if we know who we are.¹⁷

Merry’s flock and its efforts at creating manly boyhood fit into a larger tapestry being spun by progressives who remade America by reconciling individualism and corporate society. They thought combating overcivilization—the decay of manly physical and intellectual power stemming from Gilded Age excess—with a new manliness blending physicality and intellect would drive the nation’s economic expansion overseas while mediating the upward social pressure applied by women and nonwhites. Also, while progressives saw the early twentieth century’s emerging consumer economy as a potential source of unity, balancing conformity with individual identity was problematic. The flock’s negotiation of individual desires with the compromises required by their imagined community ensured their mutual participation in the nation’s refashioning of will into willpower. For most of the nineteenth century, will dictated that a man deny himself while waiting for the right and proper opportunities in life. The middling sorts supposed men who could not avoid deleterious activities wasted their energy and risked missing out on the main chance—their one opportunity at climbing the ladder of success.¹⁸ This moral algebra came into question during the nineties when the Panic of 1893 and the last shudder of the Long Depression emphasized the necessity of navigating these problems by demonstrating how close the nation was to collapse and chaos. The key, many people believed, was finding new ways of tapping into a heretofore unused personal inner energy. Doing so would propel one’s fortunes in a direction that was both individually and socially beneficial by blending liberation and limitation.¹⁹ Willpower, the positive use of self and ability to make opportunities where they might not seem apparent by expending energy and resources, emphasized an individual’s realization of ambitions despite difficult circumstances.²⁰ Merry’s flock described their efforts as willful expressions of what spending money on the right sort of reading could do to make boys into men worthy of respect, though how that process functioned and what it meant was under constant refashioning.²¹

Readers complicated the emergence and hardening of prescribed roles for juveniles that helped define America as a modern nation. Public life for young people grew more restrictive as adults commandeered their coming of age for their own good. Joining Merry’s flock gave young readers a way of resisting the absolute control of adults. In much the same way that some black middle-class men rejected their roles as negative referents that propped up white civilization, manly boyhood was a product of an interaction wherein some young people resisted the definition of themselves as non-manly because of age by appropriating hegemonic manhood to fit their circumstances and proving their belief in white supremacy.²² Middle-class boys in particular saw using Tip Top as a way of proving they had the willpower to become men with an understanding of tradition and a yen for new opportunities—joining Merry’s flock was a way of working with and against people who would define them as children or adolescents and incapable of acting for themselves. Patten’s stories emphasized the relationship between competing, working hard, playing fairly, and recognizing authority. And, in doing so [they] masked the didacticism inherent in Frank’s ceaseless preaching . . . [his] victories provided empirical evidence of the truth of Frank’s training and beliefs.²³ Sports made Merriwell’s success seem natural and normal; they obscured the fact that few people could achieve his success. On levels both institutional and personal readers worked with manliness and made sense of a changing world by redefining how boys became men. These were people who negotiated the historical changes that came with new ideas about childhood and adolescence. Historians know much more about what adults made of these changes than they do about children’s reactions.²⁴

Tip Top depicted a goal rather than reality—what should be rather than what was, even as it put people to work defining manly boyhood. Merriwell’s popularity and the rise of the sports, schools, and empire stories marked the decline of dime novels rooted in working-class values. After Gilded Age industrial capitalism hamstrung the producing class, [a] new national allegory based on . . . resurgent racism and imperial ventures . . . [formed] the master plot for the cheap stories of [a Street and Smith detective character named] Nick Carter and Frank Merriwell.²⁵ Even with Tip Top’s distinct Anglo-Saxon chauvinism the relationship between the Merriwell saga and middle-class values at 1900 has always been hazy.²⁶ Making, selling, and reading Merriwell meant creating the fiction that Tip Top described as actual American boys. Hence, Tip Top reflected the influence of everyday Americans, even if it did not represent the strictest truths of their existences. The fiction that Merriwell was a representative all-American boy was not calculated. It was an unintended consequence of the progressive ethos at work.

Merriwell’s popularity was both a blessing and a curse. It made him an archetypical character that defined the emerging schoolboy sports genre, and he was defined by it in return; tied his creator to writing stories as a boyologist; and made his readers into middle-class boys who proved that they could participate and contribute to an important endeavor by distilling boyhood down to its most essential traits. By the end of its run, Tip Top communicated that being an all-American boy meant having a life different from that of girl, adult, nonwhite, working-class, or upper-class Americans. But, joining