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After American rejection of the Covenant, which London could not influence, the League was overshadowed by the Allied Supreme Council which tackled the main post‐war issues. The British supported the Canadian attempt to delete article 10 (the territorial guarantee) but this was not seen as an important issue. Nor was the elaboration of procedures for sanctions under article 16 (the guarantee of peace) through the nineteen resolutions of 1921. Lord Curzon succeeded Balfour as Foreign Secretary. Rejecting balance of power politics, he valued the League as embodying moral principles in the conduct of international affairs. The League was involved in the resolution of several crises including Armenia (1920), North Persia (1920), Vilna (1920–3), Upper Silesia (1921), and Albania (1921). Its record was mixed. Meanwhile, Cecil, aiming to replace Lloyd George with a high‐minded coalition under Grey, turned the League of Nations Union into a significant force in British politics.

This chapter talks about how the Nisei soldier, the Japanese American Citizens League's (JACL) brainchild, answered various race and citizenship imperatives in the 1940s and 1950s. For all Japanese Americans, Nisei fighters guaranteed their claims to assimilability and national belonging by responding to the call to arms, recasting them from enemy aliens to loyal citizens in the process. As the pinnacle of wartime masculinity, soldiering allowed Japanese American men in particular to rebut deep-rooted popular beliefs that the gender identities of “Oriental” men were feminized, ambiguous, or deviant. For JACL, the ascendance of the warrior persona, recognized and lauded by the public and policymakers, offered reassurance that its orientation was indeed the righteous path to redemption for both itself and the ethnic community.

This chapter considers how the conditions of production and dissemination of children's literature changed beginning in the mid-1930s, and looks at the particular ways that leftists, in response to these changes, began to reshape the field and its output in the years prior to the onset of the Cold War. Beginning in the mid-1930s, especially thanks to a Popular Front effort to broaden left-wing influence in American life, members of the Communist milieu began to write children's books that were geared toward a wide audience. This effort intersected with a growing sense among librarians, teachers, and other established members of the children's literature field (including the influential Child Study Association) that children should be exposed to real-world issues and cultural diversity (“interracial books”), a theme that became especially pronounced during World War II. Following discussions of left-wing efforts through the New Masses and organizations such as the League of American Writers to expand a leftist presence in children's literature, and institutional developments among educators, librarians, and publishers (including union efforts among teachers, the formation of a Progressive Librarians Council, and the development of the 25-cent Little Golden Book). The chapter concludes with an analysis of several books that promote an anti-fascist and anti-racist sensibility in children. Among the authors discussed in this chapter are Harry Granick, Marshall McClintock, Mary Elting, Lavinia Davis, John R. Tunis, Florence Crannell Means, Doris Gates, Henry Gregor Felsen, and Emma Gelders Sterne.

Negro leagues come and go, and three reasons seem to supply the answer: that the leagues are underfinanced, that they lack leadership in the beginning, and that they never achieved the stability or discipline of white organized baseball due to the two reasons given. The chapter also tells us about Andrew Foster and his proposal of a national association patterned after the big leagues which later became the National Association of Colored Professional Baseball Clubs and the Negro National League, both of which became widely accepted among the baseball clubs. The Eastern Colored League was also opened but there was enmity between the two leagues. The chapter also discusses the effects of Foster's resignation from the League resulting in its subsequent death. A new Negro National League and the Negro American League were later formed and became successful.

This chapter examines how, in seeking to produce new envisagements about Japanese Americans, Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) spoke to mid-twentieth-century liberals' confidence in the ability of educational campaigns and social science to transform existing ideas about race and alter the country's racial order. Constituents of the era's race relations complex identified Nikkei citizenship as an American dilemma to be repaired in order to prove the nation's capacity for righting its wrongs, thereby protecting the United States' global position. The celebration of Japanese Americans as model minorities seemed to vindicate the assimilationist approach to rehabilitating Nikkei citizenship as espoused by JACL and its allies. Yet at the same moment, the emergence of this image undermined the league's dominant position within the Nikkei community.

This chapter examines the extant evidence concerning the National Afro-American League's test case litigation and state legislative reform efforts and explores the political and legal perspectives of the lawyers whose ideas were key to this activity. It analyzes the reasons for the Afro-American League's demise at a national level several years after its founding and assesses its nevertheless important contributions to later civil rights organizing, tracing in particular how the Afro-American League's founding principles provided the template for the NAACP's founding several decades later.

This chapter examines the heyday of the Kansas City Chiefs-Oakland Raiders American Football League rivalry. Their face-offs during the 1968 and 1969 seasons took place amid racial revolt, including the rise of the Black Panthers and the riots following Martin Luther King’s death. It also was a time of increased activism among African American athletes, including those in the AFL. Media coverage of the social ferment ranged from reactionary in the Oakland Tribune to more progressive in Sports Illustrated’s landmark 1968 series on the black athlete. Paralleling the struggles of Oakland and Kansas City to improve their public images, the AFL battled perceptions that it was an inferior league. Those perceptions were countered by the Chiefs’ win in Super Bowl IV.

The war's impact on free speech at home, along with Attorney General Mitchell Palmer's brutal raids on suspected radicals, intensified Mencken's belief in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But with America at war, the New York Evening Mail closed to him, and The Smart Set in peril, Mencken took on a neutral subject that would forever after identify him as a uniquely American voice: a study of The American Language. Simultaneously, he launched Prejudices, a series of essays attacking the Genteel Tradition in literature and intellectual cowardice. After the war, he returned to the Baltimore Sun, his books were widely embraced, and he became hailed as an important new critic. In 1919, Mencken came to the realization that he lived not in a literary age, but a fiercely political age.

This chapter presents the address Fortune gave before the inaugural convention of the Afro-American League in Chicago on January 25, 1890. The league was the nation's first national civil rights organization and a group whose creation Fortune had called for since 1884. In the speech he outlined the organization and its agenda. In many ways this organization and the program that Fortune was outlining would be echoed in the formation of other organizations in the years to follow, including the Afro-American Council, the Constitution League, the Committee of Twelve, the Niagara Movement, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Chapter 2 describes the emergence of the black press and the rise of African American civic organizations and political clubs. It argues that newspapers like the Chicago Conservator, launched by editor and lawyer Ferdinand Barnett, helped set national political agendas and sought to define a cohesive set of interests for black Americans. The city's civic organizations, along with national groups like T. Thomas Fortune's Afro-American League, gave voice to black disillusionment with the Republican Party and aimed to create distinctly African American political organizations.

This chapter focuses on the Congressional hearings conducted in 1959 and 1960 to address the issue of expansion and prospective new leagues. All of the league constitutions contained clauses pertaining to relocating or selling existing franchises and creating new franchises. These clauses typically required a supermajority, in some cases unanimity, of owners to approve franchise relocation or sales and expansion. However, incumbent owners were lukewarm about franchise expansion and hostile towards new leagues. This chapter begins with a discussion of tactics employed by team owners to prevent the entry of a new league, including territorial rights. It then considers the demise of the Continental League due to a number of hurdles, such as getting television contracts, providing pension benefits equivalent to Major League Baseball's (MLB) scheme, and and getting stadiums. It also examines the expansion policies of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL), along with the legal wrangling between the NFL and the American Football League (AFL) over expansion.

This chapter provides an analytical narrative of the precise details of the Society’s founding and sheds light on the network of elite Britons and Americans who established the organisation. It examines the Society’s stated aims of improving Anglo-American relations and introduces the Society’s membership and principal characters, including people like the British Pilgrims’ hyperactive organiser and first secretary, Harry Brittain. It also explains that the Pilgrims was the most significant of all the Anglo-American clubs and societies formed around this time (including the Anglo-American League) because it managed to combine exclusivity with its advantageous locations in the British political and diplomatic capital, London, and the American commercial capital, New York. The Pilgrims was a part of the elite social scene of both cities and benefited from existing social, cultural, and associational links between its members and other influential individuals. As a result, the Pilgrims Society was able to act as a conduit between official and unofficial elements in Britain and the US.

This chapter examines the idea that baseball in the United States was an unlawful trust or monopoly. It begins by looking at the earliest antitrust attacks against baseball before turning to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and its implications for baseball and other kinds of businesses. It then considers the detailed agreement among baseball clubs called the “National Agreement,” and whether it was a contract in restraint of trade. It also discusses the Federal League's lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago in January 1915, against the National League and its president John Tener, the American League and its president Ban Johnson, and National Commission chairman August Herrmann. It analyzes the Federal League's claim that organized baseball violated federal antitrust law as well as the law of each of the states in which its teams were located.

This chapter charts the National Football League's (NFL) meteoric rise, thanks to NFL Films' unwavering designation of pro football as a unique and unifying reflection of America. Fueled by a combination of sport and media's increasingly profitable symbiosis and Commissioner Pete Rozelle's image-consciousness, the NFL enhanced its marketing efforts during the 1960s and began to diversify aggressively, creating branded products that reached out to audiences beyond the white, middle-class men who composed its typical fan base. The Rozelle-era NFL solidified its prominence in American culture through its merger with the American Football League and subsequent development of the Super Bowl. This chapter examines how the NFL made connections to as many potential fans as possible by establishing national television exposure, branding various items, organizing athletic events for kids, donating to charitable causes, and creating a tourist attraction. It looks at one production that codified NFL Films' signature aesthetic practices, They Call It Pro Football, and how it situates professional football as “the sport of our time.”

This chapter examines the history of the rivalry between the Federal League and the American and National leagues and how it culminated in a legal battle. The Federal League of Professional Base Ball Clubs was established in 1913, with the goal of challenging the supremacy of the two established major leagues. It was formed from the remnants of two failed 1912 ventures, the Columbian League and the United States League, through the initiative of John Powers, William McCullough, and Otto Stifel. This chapter first traces the beginnings of the Federal League, from its inception to its creation of franchises, recruitment of players, and team owners' efforts to elevate the stature of their fledgling circuit. It then discusses the origins of the Federal League's legal tussle with organized baseball, focusing on its use of the Sherman Antitrust Act to challenge the latter's blacklisting practices and the reserve clause and to convince the federal government to launch an antitrust probe of both leagues.

This chapter presents the editorial, “Failure of the Afro-American People to Organize,” where Fortune reflected on the attempts of the race to organize civil rights organizations. He examined his own efforts to create the Afro-American League and the efforts of those individuals who had tried to sustain the Afro-American Council and the Niagara Movement. Although he acknowledged the importance of their efforts, he concluded that the masses have taken no interest in sustaining the organization and therefore the groups were failures. They need to get the masses aroused, he argued, and stop being windjamming organizations.

This chapter focuses on Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis's delayed decision in Federal League of Professional Base Ball Clubs v. National League spanning the period February 1915 to February 1916. After attorneys for organized baseball filed their formal answers to the Federal League's allegations on behalf of each of the twenty-one defendants, all that remained was for the parties to wait for Landis to issue his opinion. The Federal League continued its preparations for the 1915 season while also also fighting off attempts by the American and National Leagues to steal back more of its players. As the weeks continued to pass without a decision, the Federals once again began to explore a possible settlement with both leagues. This chapter discusses the Federal League's petition asking Landis to lift the preliminary injunction against Armando Marsans, its settlement negotiations with organized baseball and how the peace process was impacted by the Baltimore Federals's grievances, and Landis's dismissal of the Federal antitrust suit “without prejudice.”

This chapter examines Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs and its dismissal, focusing on the period between February 1916 and June 1917. In the weeks following the dismissal of the Federal League's antitrust suit, organized baseball worked behind the scenes to resolve its budding dispute with the Baltimore Federals. The American and National Leagues sought to persuade Jack Dunn, owner of the city's International League team, to purchase the BaltFeds's stadium, thereby securing some settlement proceeds for the rival franchise. At the same time that organized baseball was dealing with Baltimore, it was also trying to resolve its own outstanding legal fees from the Federal League case. Baltimore, meanwhile, continued to build its case that federal antitrust law applied to professional baseball. This chapter first considers the BaltFeds's settlement negotiations with organized baseball before discussing the proceedings of its antitrust suit and Judge Oliver B. Dickinson's decision to dismiss the case.

This chapter examines the case of Federal League of Professional Base Ball Clubs v. National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, filed in January 1915 by the Federal League in federal district court in Chicago and presided by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The lawsuit named both the American and National Leagues as defendants, along with the sixteen major league franchises, and each of the three members of the National Commission: August Herrmann, Ban Johnson, and John Tener. In its 92-page complaint, the Federal League accused the major leagues of forming an illegal monopoly in violation of federal and state antitrust laws. It also claimed that organized baseball had conspired to injure or destroy the Federal League. This chapter discusses the details of the Federal suit, along with affidavits, each party's legal representation, jurisdictional issues, and public statements regarding the case.