Introduction TRAIN RIDE TO THE BALLPARK
As steam from speeding locomotives wafted into the New England ether in the summer of 1872, a heroic canine waged a daily contest. Every day, the dog traced the railroad tracks by the Connecticut River, trying to catch the train; every day, he came up short. Undeterred, he kept after it. He refused to lose. His Sisyphean hustle was immortalized in the July 18, 1872, edition of the Seattle newspaper the Puget Sound Dispatch: “An ambitious dog sallies forth every day when the train comes. He fails, but hope springs eternal in the canine breast, and he continues, expecting with practice to beat the iron horse.”1 In the pup’s determination to track down a train, the Dispatch found a metaphor for colonial Seattle.
The competition to secure railroad lines was a high-stakes contest, and Seattle didn’t want to be left behind. All around Puget Sound were feisty settlements, each vying for the title of premier city of the Pacific Northwest. One hundred eighty miles south of Seattle, the city of Portland emerged an early contender for the Pacific coast crown, its situation along the Willamette River positioning it as a trade hub. Farther south, San Francisco was the undisputed champion of the American West: it dwarfed Seattle and its surrounding competitors, using the timber that Puget Sound towns farmed and sent there to build a buzzing metropolis in the Bay Area. Before upstart Seattle could breathe the rarified air of its superiors, it would have to defeat its area siblings: Snohomish, Newcastle, Olympia, Victoria, and above all, Tacoma.
Powerful railroad firms looked to place a train terminal somewhere along Puget Sound. Allowing a rival town to take what Seattleites believed to be theirs by dint of hard work and providence would constitute a grave defeat of great material and psychological consequence. It couldn’t happen. Seattle could not lose. But a year after the Dispatch chronicled the dog’s railroad chase, devastating news came to Seattle’s two thousand residents via telegram on July 14, 1873: the Northern Pacific Railway located the lusted-after train terminal thirty miles away—in Tacoma.2 A year earlier, Seattle had entered a regional bidding war for the depot, offering Northern Pacific Railway three thousand acres of land and a big bucket of bonds and cash. The dowry was worth $17 million. The city’s residents were confident this offer would lead to corporate commitment.3 Poor Seattle had sold itself out, but was not selected.
How could this have happened?
Seattle was desirable. It had waterfront views. It had two sawmills. It had a fledgling real estate market, proximity to coal mines, and waterways for coastal trade. Seattle had more people than any Puget Sound city besides Olympia. But the attributes that made it a great locale for a railroad depot worked against it: the leviathan Northern Pacific Railway sought not just cheap labor to build their lines but also cheap land on which to build them. Railroad robber barons played the real estate market as a side hustle. So instead of putting more money in the hands of Seattle’s already-established business class, Northern Pacific ran their rail through Tacoma—a tiny backwater of two hundred people that wouldn’t even incorporate as a city until two years later.4 Tacoma, not Seattle, would enjoy the spoils of victory: population growth, gluts of industry and national attention, a place on the actual map. In the cauldron of frontier capitalism, Seattle had done battle and lost.
Upon hearing the news, Seattleites cursed the businessmen who betrayed them. Many moved. But those who stayed didn’t take the defeat lying down. Here was a city that prided itself on settler tenacity: “The pioneers of Puget Sound cut their trees and built their cabins and forced the wilderness back from a dozen beachheads,” wrote Murray Morgan in his classic 1951 narrative of colonial Seattle, Skid Road.5 “They had endured the damp and the mud, they had gone without salt and flour, they had left friends and relatives and comforts two thousand miles behind.” If the ongoing frontier genocide they perpetrated against Puget Sound’s Indigenous peoples was any indication, colonial Seattleites wouldn’t be suffering the Tacoma defeat lightly.
When white settlers arrived in the Puget Sound area in November 1851 with the intent of establishing the colony that became Seattle, they accused the Indigenous people already living there of being lazy.6 “Fish and berries give them an easy livelihood,” a white land surveyor wrote of Puget Sound Natives in 1851.7 “They float through life.” Although white settlers depended on Coast Salish peoples for food and labor, lies about Native laziness provided a pretext for colonization. White Seattleites encroached upon Indigenous land, exploited the Indigenous to build their town with Native-farmed lumber and agricultural knowledge, sparked bloody conflagrations with the Coast Salish that bubbled over into open war, then named their settlement after the vanquished Duwamish statesman Chief Seattle in 1865—the same year the town’s first city council passed a law banning Natives from the city. Colonial Seattleites were wanton. They’d fight any foe, scale any height, and sink to any depth to realize the fantasy of global prestige upon which their settlement had been founded.
Believing their town to be a great metropolis-in-the-making, the original name Seattle’s colonists came up with for their town was “New York Alki,” with alki meaning “eventually” in the Chinook language. In 1874, after the Northern Pacific Railway decided to run through Tacoma, Seattle’s residents rallied, drunk with thoughts of revenge and eager to chart a course to becoming a world-class city. A preposterous idea emerged among aggrieved Seattleites in saloons and civic gatherings: Why couldn’t they build a rail line themselves? “Let’s quit fooling and get to work,” said pioneer Henry Yesler, whose dinky lumber mill was supposed to attract the Northern Pacific Railway.8 Connecting Seattle to railway depots hundreds of miles away in Eastern Washington would have entailed exceeding amounts of work and money. It was an absurd plan. Mercifully, it was aborted when an 1873 recession evaporated the funds needed to complete it. But while the self-made railroad was a short-lived pipe dream, the civic spirit it spawned survived. Many Seattleites began to believe that the key to becoming a great city was wanting it badly enough.
At about this time, baseball became a Seattle obsession that ran parallel to the railroad, the two tracks starting in the same place—civic ambition—and heading in a similar direction. In the spring of 1877, coal miners from the nearby town Newcastle challenged “any picked nine” from Seattle to a baseball game.9 A Seattle logger and a business clerk teamed up to play pitcher and catcher, then fielded a team of elites and proletarians, capitalists and workaday laborers in Henry Yesler’s mill. Wearing street clothes, Seattle vaporized Newcastle by a score of 51–0 in May 1877. Two hundred Seattleites accompanied the team on a boat to Canada for a game against Victoria, where the unnamed Seattle squad prevailed again. Winning felt good. Pioneer whites snubbed by the Northern Pacific healed their bruised egos by paying the pain forward on the field of play.
Baseball was a shortcut to the business clout the railroad would’ve brought. Before a July 4, 1877, rematch against Victoria, local businessmen raised $11,000 in hand-circulated financial contributions to the Seattle team. Wearing tailored uniforms and playing as the “Alkis”—the Indigenous name whites first gave their settlement—Seattle beat Victoria again in front of a thousand spectators on a playfield in the neighborhood Georgetown. When the Alkis notched another victory against Port Gamble later in 1877, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer praised the team for showing that Seattle was “good for something other than clams and timber.”10
Seattle was a proud city. Its residents hadn’t given up on the railroad. They named their first-ever baseball team the Alkis—the Eventualies—because they believed they’d one day live in a great city.11 But before long, the city’s lust for baseball glory and trains crashed at the same destination: abject failure.
Festival organizers slated Seattle’s baseball team, now playing as the Reds, to play two games against Snohomish to celebrate railroad magnate Henry Villard’s trip to the city in autumn 1883. Villard talked a good game. He promised to bring a railroad depot to Seattle a decade after the Tacoma defeat. Villard’s visit prompted the most elaborate celebration in the young city’s history; arches carved of evergreens adorned city streets above the parade route downtown. As part of the festivities, the Reds would play Snohomish in a doubleheader.12
Because the railroad and the baseball games both announced Seattle’s intention to prevail over other Puget Sound towns, there was much at stake in these games in terms of civic pride. Consequently, residents were crushed to see Seattle drop both games by scores of 14–8 and 6–3, respectively. In a smoldering diatribe on October 6, 1883, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer lambasted the Reds for embarrassing the city: “For shame, boys! That you allowed yourself to be beaten, and then taunted and insulted over it, is humiliating to all in town. Disband your organization or get yourself in trim.”13 The Post-Intelligencer had absorbed the Puget Sound Dispatch that made a civic mascot of the railroad-obsessed dog in New England. The paper’s sportswriters did no additional reporting to determine if the canine caught the train—Seattle sure didn’t: after his promise to bring the city a train depot, Henry Villard went bankrupt. Bereft of investors, his company crumbled in January 1884. Seattle’s train ambitions toppled with it. The city plunged into a localized recession.
When the railroad bubble busted, white Seattleites who had tolerated Chinese immigrants as a source of cheap labor (when they thought there were train tracks to lay) became hostile. In February 1886 a mob assisted by the city’s cops expunged all but about a dozen of Seattle’s estimated 350 Chinese from the city’s Chinatown.14 Losers in baseball and global commerce, Seattle had stooped to a new low.
For American cities, sports have never been just sports. Athletics are great vaults of fiscal and psychological investment, symbols of socioeconomic competition between groups that have more power and those that have less. Sports are an abstraction of the relationship that city dwellers have with other city dwellers, that cities have with other cities, and that urbanites have with their built and natural environments. How people do anything is how they do everything; the games people play say a lot about who they are.
Seattle’s place on the far left coast of the United States puts it in the center of stories about hard work and self-reliance that Americans have been telling themselves since the age of westward expansion. In the same way that colonial Seattleites believed they could fashion a great city from thin air and willpower, many American city dwellers—even the urban poor—believe themselves to be momentarily defeated aristocrats who will one day become wealthy with just a little more effort. Just as sports fandom is subject to euphoric highs and devastating lows, politics in American cities sway from periods of progress to eras of retrenchment. The climax of collective action is often followed by a conservative crash. Progressives in America’s cities experience their politics as they experience their sports: through a few ups and many downs, on the edge of failure, and at risk of heartbreak.
Heartbreak City tracks this contest between progressivism and conservatism in American cities through the medium of athletics in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. I argue that historical iterations of the progressive movement succeeded inasmuch as they made the absolute most of opportunities for political transformation and failed to the extent that reactionaries countermobilized to undo progressive gains. Through the prism of Seattle and its sundry rivalries with other American cities, I show how progressive urbanites use athletics to solve persistent problems in American life: racism, gender inequity, and repression of sexual minorities; ableism, wealth inequality, and ruination of the environment. Concurrently, opponents of social progress have used sport to consolidate their power. Cities are open-air arenas where the forward winds of progress and gusts of regressivity swirl.
Tennis, swimming, golf, boxing, pickleball. Nearly every American sport appears in this book because every sport is politically significant. Basketball is the sport of forward-thinking urbanism, a game of grace and fluidity where divides of race and gender are confronted and reconciled: the SuperSonics modeled Black Seattle’s fight for socioeconomic inclusion, while the Storm galvanized underrepresented women and LGBTQ+ fans. Conversely, hockey and football are rugged recreations that resurrect the survival-of-the-fittest frontier heritage that Seattle never truly left behind. As technological change proceeded at an unprecedented rate in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, crowds cheered the hypermasculine exploits of the Seattle Metropolitans and Seahawks, respectively. Ultimately, though, this book’s structure follows that of a baseball game. Its chapters unfurl as “innings” where progressives try to sustain momentum while stopping their opponents from doing the same.
If basketball is poetry—each possession an iambic stanza delivered quickly on the court’s compressed lines—then baseball is a novel, with overlapping stories playing out across long swaths of space and time. Baseball and history both have payoffs, the former on full count pitches where sustained tension peaks, the latter in moments where mundane events are later revealed to have major consequences. In 1893 the Northern Pacific Railway that backstabbed the city sold forty acres of Seattle-area land to an enterprising German immigrant named Friedrich Trump, starting his family’s fortune.15
In Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, architectural critic Paul Goldberger writes “in the ballpark, the two sides of the American character—the impulse toward rural expanse and the belief in the city and industrial infrastructure—cannot be torn apart.”16 The sport juxtaposes the dense crowd and the grassy field on which only an elite few may play. In many ways Seattle political history unfolds as the resolution of this tension.
Baseball has data for everything. The figure that relays heartbreak is “runners in scoring position,” a stat that measures how well a team capitalizes on chances to score. The cruel pastime lets you know when potential runs are aboard the bases, making the sense of possibility more tangible, the expectations more tantalizing, and the failure to cash them in more tragic than in sports where potential is less palpable. Opportunities—seized and missed—decide our sports as they decide our politics.
Seattle and its people have long had a love-hate affair with sports; in Heartbreak City, I try to count the ways. Athletics are often at the center of raging debates over city space and public funds: in the early twentieth century, biking activists urged the city to tax itself to pave the city’s first roads. In Seattle history sports have also typified competitions over resources between the city’s ethnic groups: as segregation in Seattle housing, schools, and jobs endured, a 1957 title fight between a Black heavyweight champion of the world and a local white amateur became a charged racial spectacle. Examples of marginalized groups using sports as an instrument of greater sociopolitical inclusion are many. Seattle Japanese American baseball teams defeated military police in games played in incarceration camps in the 1940s, while women and LGBTQ+ bikers bucked retrograde gender norms after World War II. Popular games are also often deployed as a metaphor for politics, a simile of broader contests that find a microcosm in sport. While cracking down on organized labor during the Seattle General Strike of 1919, Mayor Ole Hanson wrote proudly of “[not allowing] anarchists to get to first base.”17 Through it all—strikes and ball games, swings at progressive change, and misses—sports are something like the soul of Seattle. Our games animate the values and aspirations of our city, in much the same way that love brings the best and worst out of the people in our lives.
The first part of Heartbreak City spans 1893 through 1942. It details the establishment of the initial progressive political framework in the United States, its subsequent iteration in the New Deal policies of the 1930s, and the impact this current of social change had on the intersection of sport and politics in Seattle. With the help of activists who encouraged the city to build inclusive bike paths and playgrounds, Seattle separated itself from its frontier past at the turn of the twentieth century; the roughneck sports of college football and professional hockey dragged it back, psychologically and socially, to the days of westward expansion. During the regressive 1920s, Seattleites built racially exclusive neighborhoods and golf courses that were accessible mostly by cars. Automobiles encroached on street baseball games and enabled exclusive mountain sports. This Seattle freeze of sociopolitical exclusion thawed in the 1930s. A new collectivist tide in local and national politics was reflected in the rising popularity of water sports, which brought Seattle the attention that Progressive Era parks activists sought a generation earlier.
The second part of the book (1945–69) is concerned with populations left out of the original progressive political framework of the earlier twentieth century. After World War II, women and LGBTQ+ Seattleites found social and physical liberation in park sports leagues and motorbiking in the latter 1940s. In the 1950s, Seattle University basketball star Elgin Baylor typified the resilience of Black Seattleites in the city’s segregated Central Area. Ultimately the failure of progressive leaders to rally Asian American, disabled, and Indigenous Seattleites led to a defining heartbreak in the city’s history: the 1968 transit elections which paved the way for the Seattle Mariners and Seattle Seahawks but failed to gift the city comprehensive mass transit.
The third part of the book (1970–99) deals with the commercialization of the progressive movement in Seattle. As Seattle gained widespread recognition as a postindustrial city of the future that would transcend the political divisions of the past, its sports teams bolstered its rising cultural cachet. Although the Seattle Sonics united the city in pursuit of the NBA Championship in 1978–79, many white fans were painfully slow to embrace the team because of the city’s racial divide. The arrival of the Seahawks gave Seattle big-league status coveted by city boosters for decades, but progenitors of a pro-corporate streak in local politics criticized players for striking in 1987. Although Black superstars Ken Griffey Jr., Shawn Kemp, and Gary Payton shined brightly in the 1990s, Seattle was still a city where white supremacists burned churches, hoping to realize their vision for a racially exclusive society. Popular periodicals and mass media—Sports Illustrated and Sleepless in Seattle—elevated Seattle as the most livable US city in the late twentieth century. The hype was all hype. Seattle’s reputation cratered, alongside the fortunes of many of its teams.
The fourth part of Heartbreak City (2000 thru the early 2020s) relays the conservative turn in American politics that led many across the country to look down upon the considerable achievements of the Seattle Storm in the WNBA as well as the popularity of soccer in the Pacific Northwest. The resurgence of political conservatism in the United States—the rise of “red” states like Oklahoma—led directly to the relocation of the Seattle SuperSonics. With the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, “blue” coastal cities like Seattle would get off the political canvas after the knockdowns of the Bush years. But the Obama administration turned out to be a missed opportunity for enduring progressive change—its failure mirrored in the national spectacle of the Seattle Seahawks’ inability to become a football dynasty in a conservative sports league.
The final chapters of this book deal with manifestations of fake progressivism in Seattle sports in the 2010s and 2020s. At this time, area progressives used the widespread exploitation of college researchers as a reason to not allow college athletes to be compensated. Self-professed environmentalist politicians dismantled the construction of bike lanes. Others opposed plans to convert golf courses into affordable housing that could help reduce carbon emissions by shortening commutes. In October 2022 the Seattle Mariners played a home playoff game in the dense fog of another summer beset by wildfire smoke; in the thick haze, little could be seen but the need to make the city the truly progressive city it had rarely been.
Historical scholarship is a contact sport that puts a writer on the contested discursive field of clashing perspectives about the past. In this colosseum of competing worldviews, those who come up short on the American social order’s hierarchy—workers, the disabled, ethnic and sexual minorities, women—are seldom represented. In contrast to many liberal historians who see American politics as a consensus-driven enterprise characterized by broad agreement on core issues, Marxist historiography depicts the US social order as a competition between capital and labor, the potent and the less powerful. In the tradition of A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn’s landmark 1980 book, Heartbreak City is a people’s history of Seattle—narrated not from the vantage point of capitalism’s victors but from the standpoint of its discontents. Because they have one winner and many who were never supposed to win, sports demystify our politics by mirroring them.
To tell the story of the politicized relationship between Seattleites and their sports, I rely heavily on newspaper accounts. An early episode in the city’s history illustrates why. In June 1913 the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffs played an exhibition baseball game against one another in Dugdale Park, located in the city’s Mount Baker neighborhood. Afraid to lose, the “Times Terrors” used its considerable financial advantage to sign an actual major league ballplayer in its game against the “Post-Intelligencer Pirates.” It was a slimy move. It sullied what was supposed to be an exhibition with the muck of big money and exposed the existential divide between the two publications. The Post-Intelligencer slammed the Times for “patching up their pitiful aggregation” by throwing cash at their hitting problems. The Times blamed crooked refs when the game ended in a tie. A few weeks after their baseball battle, the two papers brawled again—this time, over politics. In a rush to portray Seattle’s rising left-wing political bloc negatively, the pro-capitalist Times falsely blamed anarchists for causing a fight at a civic festival in Pioneer Square in July 1913.18 The Post-Intelligencer countered with accurate reporting showing that maligned leftists had nothing to do with the disturbance. The two papers duked it out all summer. Journalism being “the first draft of history,” those drafts were steeped in disagreement in Seattle.
For generations before the advent of social media websites, newspapers were the most transparent gauge of public sentiment in American cities. News write-ups, recurring columns, and letters to the editor illustrate how Seattleites felt about the times they lived in and the games they watched. The city’s competing political blocs—ethnic groups, labor unions, and organizations ranging from college leftists at the University of Washington to the Seattle chapter of the Ku Klux Klan—all had print media. Usually these publications had sports pages. Their coverage of working-class bowling teams, Asian American baseball leagues, women’s hockey, and more showed how sports embodied Seattle’s political struggles at the grassroots level. At the same time, national reporting about the city’s professional sports teams indicated how Seattle was perceived by others. A 1926 edition of The Nation reveals that male Seattleites voted out the city’s woman mayor because they felt she couldn’t adequately represent a city of “mountain climbers and pioneering outdoorsmen.”19
While trying to wrestle a clear narrative from a jumble of facts and events, I’ve found valuable teammates in a substantial body of secondary source material. I cite these sources in the text as well as in chapter endnotes but feel compelled to discuss works that were foundational to the completion of this book. The main inspiration for the scope of Heartbreak City is Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s 1986 book The Cycles of American History. Schlesinger wrote that the motor of American political history is “that elemental human experience in which enthusiasm gives way to fatigue and disenchantment—the experience that characterizes the ebb and flow of the political cycle.”20 In describing shifts from liberal periods to more conservative ones—periods of public radicalization to those of rightward retrenchment—Schlesinger flexes an athletic subtext: “Sustained public action is exhausting. A nation’s capacity for high-tension political commitment is limited. Nature insists on a respite. People can no longer gird themselves for heroic effort. They yearn to immerse themselves in the privacies of life. Worn out by the constant summons of battle, weary of ceaseless national activity, disillusioned by the results, they seek an interlude of rest and recuperation.”21
Also central to Heartbreak City are three histories of Seattle: Roger Sale’s Seattle, Past to Present, James Lyons’s Selling Seattle: Representing Contemporary Urban America, and Fred Moody’s Seattle and the Demons of Ambition.22 In perhaps the most rigorous single-volume history of Seattle ever written, UW English professor and Sonics fan Roger Sale brought all the emotional peaks and lulls of sports fandom to the narrative of Seattle, Past to Present. Lyons’s Selling Seattle, meanwhile, surveys how Seattle’s glowing national reputation in the 1990s was a consequence of the declining esteem of its rival cities; his analysis advances a materialist interpretation of popular culture that implicates sports. Moody’s Seattle and the Demons of Ambition is a darkly funny account of Seattle’s rendezvous with cycles of overachievement and failure. Sale wrote: “I know no one who has been deeply touched by Seattle who has not felt the sense of it falling short of its potential.”23 Moody’s text is an inspiration for taking this sentiment to satirical lengths, depicting a city that too often uses short-term fixes, business boosterism, and cheap pretentions to exhibit the kind of true progressivism that can only come from great public works.
Published fortuitously after I began work on the manuscript of Heartbreak City in the pandemic summer of 2020, scholar Terry Anne Scott’s (no relation) essay anthology Seattle Sports is a valuable resource that contributes several fascinating episodes about the city’s sporting history.24 In overcast Seattle there are no “untold” stories—only those under more or less sunlight.
After failing in 1873 and 1884, Seattle finally got its railroad. Transit titan James J. Hill led the Great Northern Railway to the city in 1893. Hill partnered with timber mogul Frederick Weyerhaeuser to build a line that helped Northwest firs crack markets in the American Midwest and South.25 It was a match made in capitalist heaven: the cross-continental railroad spurred new homestead settlements on the American frontier, while wood from Washington State forests formed the skeleton of millions of new domiciles in the American West.26 Thanks to the partnership between rail and timber, Seattle flourished. It grew from 42,837 residents in 1890 to 315,312 in 1920, making it America’s twentieth-largest town. Over the next century the Icarus city leaped at chances to climb even higher; it used sports to further inflate its civic ego like a lofty hot-air balloon.
The triumphs were many: the Seattle Metropolitans, SuperSonics, Storm, and Seahawks form the city’s pantheon of championship squads, alongside the University of Washington football and rowing teams. Helene Madison, Marshawn Lynch, and Sue Bird brought the city the global buzz its settlers only dreamed of. And yet Seattle is defined as much by defeats and near-misses as by its many victories. Like the pioneer dog who tried and failed to catch the train car, the Seattle Seahawks’ 2015 Super Bowl defeat reinforced a sense that the city felt doomed to fall shy of its full potential in the most excruciating ways.27 More people watched Seattle fall three feet short to New England than watched anything else on television that year. Many piled on, joining the national chorus about Seattle’s shortcoming. In our spectacular failure, urban America recognized some of its own.