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Abstract
Heralded as Americas national pastime, baseball was one of the countrys preeminent cultural activities referenced in popular fiction, vaudeville shows, black-and-white films, sheet music, radio, and the press in the early twentieth century. Sports journalists touted its cast of stars on the covers of newspapers and magazines. Historians have argued that these mythmakers of the Golden Age of Sports Writing (1920-1930) manufactured mass heroes from white ball players for mainstream media; however, they have neglected to fully examine the practice of herocrafting. This dissertation seeks to further explore the production of cultural sports heroes by investigating the journalistic conventions and working associations involved in the process through a combination of textual and archival analysis. Doing so not only reveals insights into the practices of early twentieth-century sports journalists, it also provides a unique lens into the cultural implications of hero construction. It affords a prism through which to explore the interaction between sports journalism and mainstream American culture. Press and archival sources surrounding the lives of baseball icons Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson and well-known sports journalists Grantland Rice, F.C. Lane, and John N. Wheeler were culled and analyzed. Following the cue of cultural studies theorists Raymond Williams and James Carey, this manuscript treats the study of communication as the examination of historic ritual. Overall, it involved analysis of 297 articles and columns from more than thirty general and specialty, mass-circulating newspapers and magazines and four memoirs, as well as archival documents from the University of Georgias Richard B. Russell Library in Athens, Ga., the Ty Cobb Museum in Royston, Ga., the National Baseball Hall of Fames A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Library in Cooperstown, N.Y., Vanderbilt Universitys Jean and Alexander Heard Librarys Special Collections in Nashville, Tenn., and Columbia Universitys Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New York, N.Y.