Luther Halsey Jr. Gulick

• Luther Halsey Gulick
• Born: December 4, 1865
• Died: August 13, 1918

Was the fifth of seven children born to the Rev. Luther Halsey Gulick and Louisa (Lewis) Gulick. He was born in Honolulu where his parents labored as missionaries for the American Bible Society. After spending his formative years in missionary outposts in Japan and Italy, he attended Oberlin College, intermittently between 1880 and 1885. He entered the Medical College of the University of the City of New York in 1886 and received a doctor of medicine degree in 1889. Gulick married Charlotte Vetter in 1887; they had four children.

Instead of pursuing a career in medicine, Gulick became director of the Physical Training Program of the Young Men’s Christian Association, a post he held from 1886 to 1903. During this period he created the YMCA’s emblem—the inverted triangle—as a symbol of its quest to create within the individual a harmonious balance of physical exercise, the desire for humane social intercourse, and spiritual elevation. It was also during this period that Gulick helped one of his protégés, James Naismith, design the game of basketball.

From 1900 until his death—he died in 1918 at fifty-two—Gulick was involved in a wide variety of educational and reform activities. From 1900 to 1903 he was principal of Pratt Institute High School in Brooklyn, New York; from 1903 to 1906 he was director of physical training for the New York City’s public school system; from 1906 to 1909 he was the first president of the Playground Association of America and the country’s best known advocate of organized play for urban young people; in 1907 he organized and became director of the Child Hygiene Department of the Russell Sage Foundation; in 1910, along with his Charlotte Gulick, he founded the Camp Fire Girls; and finally, in 1917, one year before his death, he went to France as an evaluator of the YMCA’s work with the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I.

One can most easily understand Gulick’s significance as an American reformer by focusing on his role in the movement to organize children’s play. Although it has received relatively little attention from historians, the movement to organize the play activities of city children and adolescents on supervised, municipally owned playgrounds was a significant (and in many respects typical) facet of that fevered, optimistic, and immensely creative period of social reform between 1890 and 1920 known as the progressive era. During these years a politically diverse group of play organizers—most of whom were progressive educators, social settlement workers, and child psychologists—analyzed children’s play and attempted to transplant it from city streets, where they thought it was unorganized and anarchic (symbolic, they thought, of the moral chaos and anarchy generated by unregulated capitalism and unrestricted immigration), onto supervised playgrounds. In the process reformers developed important ideas about the relationships between a structured play experience, child development, and political socialization.

These reformers viewed organized play as a vital medium for shaping the moral and cognitive development of the young. Equally important, organized play, particularly team sports for adolescents, was seen as an ideal means of integrating the young into the work rhythms and social values of a dynamic and ethnically diverse urban-industrial civilization. Finally, play organizers believed that team games were characterized by the need to cooperate with one’s fellows to achieve common goals and by an emotionally charged spirit of democratic fellowship. Such sentiments were, according to play organizers, lessons that should be taught to the children of immigrants; consequently, the movement to organize the play of urban youngsters was specifically, though not exclusively, aimed at this population.

The movement was extremely successful. By 1910 thousands of city playgrounds across the country had organized programs for children. Social reformers, under the auspices of the Playground Association of America, founded in 1906 by Gulick and Henry Curtis, felt that these playgrounds would help to cure a variety of festering urban maladies, including the morally and physically unhealthy tenement conditions; they would also speed the “Americanizing” of millions of recently arrived immigrants. The play movement attracted dynamic leadership, including that of Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, Lillian Wald, and Graham Taylor. It was also generously funded. Between 1880 and 1920 municipal governments spent more than $100 million on the construction and staffing of organized playgrounds.

Although the movement to organize children’s play had characteristics some historians have associated with progressive era reform—the desire to “manipulate” the young in order to make them content, productive, and cooperative citizens of an emerging “corporate state,” and a quest for “social control” over the children of immigrants in order to Americanize them—it is simplistic to view the play movement solely in this fashion. Progressive era reformers, including Gulick and others, were indeed manipulative and obsessed with the desire to control the urban young; there is nothing, however, uniquely “progressive” about these sentiments. All forms of child socialization are manipulative and bent upon social control.

Such labels reveal nothing specific about the intentions of play organizers and other progressive era reformers. The child training and political socialization espoused by play organizers was designed to create a new balance between a series of sensibilities, such as individualism and social cooperation, and personal freedom and group control over the individual. Reformers in the play movement were convinced that a twentieth-century urban civilization could not enjoy economic prosperity or political democracy if its social and economic interactions were based upon what they saw as the unrestrained “survival of the fittest” individualism of the nineteenth century. Play organizers were equally convinced, however, that economic prosperity and social progress could not be secured in a collectivist society. Playground social training, therefore, was designed to create a new and viable middle ground or equilibrium between individualism and collectivism.

Gulick’s significance as a social reformer rests on his acute ability to embody in his theories of organized play this progressive balance between freedom and order and individualism and social cooperation. In Gulick’s view, organized play, especially team games, was an ideal means by which to effect this balance because it encouraged the cultivation of individual skills but linked skill development to communal (team) ends. “We are only beginning,” Gulick wrote in 1910, “to know what freedom means. In organized play, where every child is a unit of a larger, mutually responsible whole, all reach a higher and more significant stage of individual freedom than is possible on the unorganized, free-for-all playground.”

For Gulick and his fellow reformers in the play movement adolescence was the period of life during which this new concept of freedom could be most successfully inculcated. During adolescence, according to Gulick, the individual seeks moral guidance, companionship, and sources of self-esteem from significant individuals outside his family. Youth is prone to look toward peer groups to meet these personal and social needs. Gulick was aware of the dangers of peer-group control—adolescent gangs frequently terrorized American cities. At the same time, however, he insisted that what he called the adolescent’s “instinct” for group membership, if harnessed to the morally elevating ethos of supervised team games, would instill a desire for social cooperation and group loyalty in the boy that would follow him into his mature years and make him an ideal citizen and neighbor. The “gang instinct,” according to Gulick, “is the germ out of which the club, the society, the corporation—every effective organization—develops. The instinct is the chief formative element in the character of most boys, because the opinion of the gang is for them the strongest opinion that exists.”

Gulick’s originality as a progressive era reformer resided in the manner in which he linked adolescent peer-group morality to the dynamics of organized play. As cofounder and first president of the Playground Association of America, Gulick encouraged leaders of municipal playground movements to develop systems of “player self-government” on playgrounds. Taking Gulick’s lead, playground leaders in Boston, Chicago, and New York City instituted systems of player self-government. Playground “citizens” elected mayors, chiefs of police, judges, and juries. These officials judged the playground behavior of their peers and carried out “sentences” against those who violated game rules, vandalized playground property, or refused to cooperate during team games. The ultimate penalty for repeated violators of these rules was banishment from the playground and ostracism by their peers. Gulick was certain such devices would force the young to behave since “a large part of conduct is undoubtedly controlled by the ideas our friends have of us.”

It was during the supervised team game, however, that the reform dimension of Gulick’s philosophy of play was seen to have its greatest impact. The ideal of team play, according to Gulick, is a metaphor for a new style of social interaction, one that blends the beneficial aspects of nineteenth-century individualism with the cooperative ethos of twentieth-century techniques of bureaucratic cooperation. On the organized team, all players, regardless of their ethnic or class origins, are equal, and each player has a task to perform, a role to play in securing the goals of the team. Instilled in each player are the analytic skills needed for competence in an organizational society, and all are equally subordinated to the aspirations of the team (or “social whole,” as Gulick would have said). The team, in short, is an island of stability, continuity, and community in an urban sea of alienation, crime, and flux.

At the same time, however, Gulick insisted that the team experience enhanced the individual initiative that play organizers believed essential for economic and scientific progress. Each player on the baseball or basketball team was encouraged to sharpen and display his skills, though not to the point at which personal ambition and egotism endangered the team’s success. On organized playgrounds individual achievement was supposed to augment public goals and become a servant of collective progress rather than a tool of personal aggrandizement. As a social-training mechanism, the team experience was designed to create a new balance between individualism and cooperation.

Gulick’s significance as a reformer, then, rests not only on his role as the leading theoretician of the movement to organize children’s play but on his attempt to develop team-game techniques of political socialization designed to convey to young people a new ideal of social interaction—an ideal that blends the traits of the nineteenth-century achiever with the twentieth-century organization man or woman.

Luther Gulick’s papers, including his notebooks and correspondence, are housed at the Springfield College Library, Springfield, Massachusetts. Gulick’s most important published writings include A Philosophy of Play (1920); Morals and Morale (1919); “Popular Recreation and Public Morality, “Annals of the American Academy of Political and social Sciences, July 1909; Mind and Work (1908); “Team Games and Civic Loyalty,” School Review, November 1906, “Psychological, Pedagogical, and Religious Aspects of Group Games,” Pedagogical Seminary, March 1899. The only full-length biography of Gulick is E. Dorgan, Luther Halsey Gulick (1934). An extensive discussion of Gulick and his role in the play movement is to be found in D. Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (1981).