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Making Sport Great Again
The Uber-Sport
Assemblage,
Neoliberalism, and the
Trump Conjuncture

David L. Andrews
Making Sport Great Again
 David L. Andrews

Making Sport Great

Again
The Uber-Sport Assemblage, Neoliberalism,
and the Trump Conjuncture
David L. Andrews
Physical Cultural Studies Research Group
Department of Kinesiology
University of Maryland
College Park, MD, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-15001-3 ISBN 978-3-030-15002-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15002-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933877

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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To Lisa, Frankie, and Freya,
June and Peter.
Inspirations all.
With love and gratitude.
 Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making. As such it bears the
imprint of numerous influences, many of whom I presently acknowledge
and thank, though I apologize in advance for any who I inadvertently
overlook. Beginning at the University of Illinois, my doctoral advi-
sor John W. Loy demonstrated the insight and humility to nurture my
interdisciplinary persuasions, by encouraging me to take what were truly
transformative courses with Lawrence Grossberg, Norman Denzin, Paula
Treichler, Marianna Trekell, Susan Greendorfer, Syndy Sydnor, and Alan
Peshkin. At Illinois, equally as important to formal coursework were the
generative interactions between graduate students within the Department
of Kinesiology’s sociocultural research area, whose number included:
Steve Jackson, Toni Bruce, Nancy Spencer, Pirkko Markula, Amy Hribar,
Marcelo Diversi, Lesley Fishwick, Mike Giardina, Darren Treasure, Chris
Standefer, Jong-Young Lee, Dave McCann, Geneviève Rail, John Walker,
Marcelo Diversi, Elizabeth Wheatley, Heidi Krahling, Minseok Ahn,
Samantha King, Jeremy Howell, Rob Sands, Kyle Kusz, Yaping Liu, Bob
Rinehart, and Jim Denison. While it is easy to romanticize one’s gradu-
ate education, I do remember this as being a highly enjoyable, challeng-
ing, and productive group to be a part of. Turning to the University of
Memphis, I must acknowledge the role Ralph Wilcox played in nurturing
me as a young scholar. Being my first department chair, I never fully real-
ized nor appreciated the level of support and mentorship he provided.
Also, at Memphis, I was fortunate to be befriended by Robert Pitter, who
proved an invaluable sounding board during those early years.

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

Leaving Memphis was difficult, but at the University of Maryland I

have been fortunate enough to work with two department chairs, Jane
Clark and subsequently Brad Hatfield, who believed in a comprehen-
sively interdisciplinary vision of kinesiology within which social and
cultural analyses were a key component. This support enabled the estab-
lishment of the Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) research group, whose
faculty and graduate students have played the most significant role in
the shaping of my intellectual practice over the past eighteen years, and
whose influence on this book is profound. Shannon Jette has played a
crucial role guiding the trajectory of Maryland PCS, ably aided and
abetted at different times by Mike Silk, Damion Thomas, Adam Beissel,
Mike Friedman, and Jen Roberts. Of course, the Maryland PCS pro-
ject is much broader than a few individuals and has evolved as a collec-
tive in a state of perpetual becoming, driven by the vital input of the
following key contributors (listed in no particular order of influence):
Lisa Swanson, Bryan Clift, Sheri Parks, Victor Lopes, Katie Esmonde,
Amber Wiest, Jessica Chin, Kristi Tredway, Patricia Hill Collins, Eunha
Koh, Shaun Edmonds, Katie King, Laurie Frederick, Jake Bustad, Zach
Richer, Stephanie Cork, Josh Newman, Tori Thompson, Dehao Ma,
Eric Stone, Kevin Roy, Michele Donnelly, George Ritzer, Yang Zhang,
Psyche Williams-Forson, Bryan Vitagliano, Sarah Olson, Anna Posbergh,
Hanjoo Kim, Jennifer Sterling, Jeff Lucas, Julie Brice, Jennifer Collins,
Sam Clevenger, Sangwoo Nam, Jaime Schultz, Oliver Rick, Tan Zhang,
Jaleesa Newsome, Robin Sawyer, Julie Maier, Andy Grainger, Meir
Lewin, Jaime DeLuca, Nik Dickerson, Dillon Landi, Ashley Gollmann,
Shuling Wu, Perry Cohen, Wontak Kim, Callie Batts-Maddox, Dulce
Filgueira de Almeida, Joy Bauer Olympo, James McBean, Ryan King-
White, Ron Mower, Sam Bernstein, Brandon Wallace, and, of course,
Lee Vander Velden. This loose amalgam of PCSers and affiliates—at
times as much creating a difference-in-difference, as a unity-in-differ-
ence—has forged a dynamic intellectual project constantly looking for
new ways of thinking and doing, toward which this book is a contri-
bution. In more specific terms related to the book, the Rick (especial-
ly)-Clift-Bustad triumvirate (compounded by Richer) cajoled me into
reconsidering my assemblage theory skepticism, while Ryan King-White
is solely responsible for the Making Sport Great Again book title, for
which I am suitably grateful.
 Acknowledgements    ix

Outside of Maryland, there are a welter of critical sport scholars to

whom I am clearly indebted. There are too many to mention in this
acknowledgment; perusing the index of the book indicates those to
whom I am referring. There are, however, a number of people whose
influence I feel compelled to highlight. The influence of my longtime
friend and collaborator Mike Silk is, for me, readily apparent within the
structure and focus of this book, yet nonetheless demands acknowledge-
ment. C.L. Cole has been an enduring influence on my thinking, and
once rescued me from writing a doctoral dissertation on Michael Jordan
that paid little or no attention to race or racial politics. Samantha King’s
work provides a nuanced model of contextual cultural studies which I am
always looking to emulate, no less within this study. Perhaps lurking in
the background, but nonetheless present, is the influence of Toby Miller,
Rick Gruneau, Patricia Vertinsky, Richard Giulianotti, Leslie Heywood,
and Alan Ingham, all of whose work compels me to challenge any hint
of theoretical orthodoxy or empirical complacency. Always challenging
and looking to move the broader intellectual project forward, the work
of Pirkko Markula, Holly Thorpe, Steve Redhead, Geneviève Rail, Josh
Newman, Brian Wilson, Mike Giardina, and Mike Atkinson similarly
prompts me—albeit with different emphases—to embrace rather than
eschew complexity. Furthermore, among many others, Jay Coakley,
Mary McDonald, George Sage, Doug Hartmann, Caroline Fusco, David
Rowe, John Hargreaves, Jules Boykoff, Andrew Manley, John Horne,
Dan Grano, Cathy van Ingen, Michael Messner, Simone Fullagar, Zack
Furness, Emma Rich, Brad Millington, Ted Butryn, Lucia Trimbur, Dan
Burdsey, Ann Travers, Peter Donnelly, Jessica Francombe-Webb, Richard
Pringle, Cheryl Cooky, Steve Wagg, Jay Scherer, Lawrence Wenner,
David Whitson, Alan Tomlinson, Yago Colás, John Hughson, Gavin
Weedon, Kim Schimmel, Jeff Montez de Oca, Barry Smart, Mary Louise
Adams, Jennifer Hargreaves, and Garry Whannel have all unpacked the
cultural politics of physical culture, producing a body of work which var-
iously informs my understanding of the relationship between sport, neo-
liberalism, and Trumpisms. Finally, among such influences, and despite
being important confidants, both Ben Carrington and Grant Farred con-
tinue, in the nicest possible way, to demand more from my intellectual
output. I am certainly grateful for their perseverance and consider it a
mark of true friendship.
x    Acknowledgements

Of course this book would not have been published were it not for
the input of various people at Palgrave Macmillan. The prolonged time
to publication means I have outlasted a number of editors and editorial
assistants. Fortunately, Mary Al-Sayed rescued the project from its dol-
drums and, with the perfect combination of patience, knowledgeable
support, and timely nudging, guided me to completion. More recently,
Madison Allums showed great professionalism in bringing the various
elements of the manuscript together.
More than academics, I would like to thank the multitude of everyday
Americans who I have met, observed, listened to, and interacted with,
in more than three decades of living and learning in Champaign, IL,
Memphis, TN, and latterly Baltimore, MD. Though some doubtless may
not appreciate it, I would like to believe this book is written for these
cultural informants—epitomized by, among others, Polly Schurer, Dave
Jaracz, Steve McWilliams, Kathleen Almony, Matt Kohl, Cami Colarossi,
Dave Nurse, Don Roseen, Mary Tate-Evans, Steve Jaracz, Patrick
Reynolds, and the future that is Andy Jaracz—what I am more convinced
about is that, in important respects, this book was generated by them,
and people like them. Thanks also to Sam, owner of the atmospheric
Evergreen Cafe on Coldspring Lane in Baltimore, for nurturing the type
of writing-friendly space where much of this book was completed.
Lastly, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the role of my
family in bringing this project to fruition. My parents, June and Peter
Andrews, have only ever been encouraging, supportive, and, I like to
think, everyday advocates for social justice and equality. Perhaps more
than anyone else, this book bears their imprint. Better read than most
academics I know, Gareth and Davy Rees have always and unerringly
nudged me in the right direction. As for Lisa, Frankie, and Freya, they
are the ones who have faced the brunt of my writing-induced preoccu-
pations and frustrations, for which I can only apologize. Their habitu-
ally loving—if incorrigibly teasing—management of my writing persona
certainly kept me focused on the task at hand. More than anyone, Lisa
lovingly guided me through some challenging times which threatened to
permanently derail the project. I will be forever in her debt for getting
me, and the book, back on track.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Uber-Sport as Culture Industry 1

Situating Uber-Sport 5
(Re)Turning to Frankfurt 13
One-Dimensional Uber-Sport 19
References 25

2 Assembling Uber-Sport 31
Uber-Sport as Late Capitalism 32
The Integrated Uber-Sport Spectacle 38
Of Assemblage and Rhizome 44
References 56

3 Uber-Sporting Neoliberalisms 61
Naming Neoliberalisms 63
Enmeshed Assemblages 72
Consuming Spaces and Subjects 80
References 94

4 Trumping the Uber-Sport Assemblage 103

Assemblage and Articulation 105
A Conjunctural Populism 119
Making Enemies, and Friends, from Within 131
References 141

xi
xii    Contents

5 Conclusion—How and Why to Read Uber-Sport? 151

References 157

Index 159
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Uber-Sport
as Culture Industry

Abstract This chapter provides an on overview of the focus of the book’s

primary focus: examining the relationship between sport and politics in the
contemporary U.S. It introduces uber-sport as the project’s primary object
of study, and situates it as the sporting expression of a late capitalist society
driven and defined by the processes of corporatization, commercialization,
spectacularization, and celebritization. The discussion turns to the critical
theory of the Frankfurt School as a way of explaining how uber-sport is rei-
fied; ascribed sense of independent materiality, which obscures the broader
social, cultural, political, and economic forces shaping the structure and
experience of uber-sport. Adorno’s, Horkheimer’s, and Marcuse’s respective
theories of consumer capitalism are used in identifying uber-sport as a cul-
ture industry reinforcing the practices and values of late capitalist society.

Keywords Sport · Politics · Uber-sport · Late capitalism ·

Critical theory · Adorno · Horkheimer · Reification · Culture
industries · Marcuse · One-dimensional sport

This project was initiated in July 2015, when Donald J. Trump had
only just announced his intention to run for the Republican nomina-
tion for the 2016 US presidential election. At the time, few took the
Trump campaign seriously, it being widely considered another public
relations stunt from an individual preoccupied with building his epony-
mous brand. As originally imagined, this book was to critically examine

© The Author(s) 2019 1

D. L. Andrews, Making Sport Great Again,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15002-0_1
2 D. L. ANDREWS

high-profile sport’s role in normalizing, and thereby corroborating, neo-

liberalism’s position as an epoch-defining economic-political-cultural
project that had radically reworked the nature and experience of US soci-
ety. Trump may have appeared somewhere in the discussion in reference
to his golf course developments or failed bid to purchase an NFL fran-
chise, but I doubt it. Derailed by a series of unforeseen personal events,
the project re-commenced exactly two years later in a US instant that
appeared and certainly felt unrecognizable from that which preceded it.
On its resumption, I anticipated the project would need to be radi-
cally revised and updated to reflect the new America and sport’s position
therein. However, the more I reflected upon and experienced it, the less
transformed the Trump nation revealed itself to be. Rather than indica-
tive of some epochal break, the political rise of Donald Trump (and, for
that matter, Trumpism: the ideologies and affective investments enacted
by the Trump campaign, and subsequently materialized through the
pronouncements and policies of the Trump administration) is better
explained as the latest iteration of the American reactionary right’s ide-
ological mobilization: a process going back at least to the early 1960s.
Americanizing Stuart Hall (1983), the great moving right show of US
politics was manifest in the policies, if not the persona, of presidencies
from Reagan through Obama. Albeit expressed in a more bombastic
and populist register, the Trump regime thus represents more a con-
tinuation—if a frequently contradictory and meandering one—rather
than a conclusive rupture from the politics which preceded it. Hence,
the rationale for this project remained the same: a desire to expose the
“political-cultural work” implicating the sport industry in “spreading,
installing, universalising and naturalising neoliberalism” (Clarke, 2016,
p. 239), as an iniquitous, divisive, and undemocratic political forma-
tion (Brown, 2015; Giroux, 2011). In Braidotti’s terms, explicating
the relationship between a popular cultural practice (uber-sport) and the
operations of neoliberal power and domination within the contempo-
rary US is impelled by a “radical aspiration to freedom through” under-
standing: an “epistemophilic yearning for the empowerment that comes
with knowledge…of the specific conditions and relations of power that
are imminent to our historical locations” (Braidotti, 2013, pp. 11–12).
Such is the epistemic yearning motivating this critical contextual
undertaking.
The revisited and reworked version of this project is not as radically
different as initially anticipated. Yes, the relationship between sport and
 1 INTRODUCTION: UBER-SPORT AS CULTURE INDUSTRY 3

Trump’s rise to the presidency, and Trumpist practices of governance,

demand analysis, but only following an explication of sport’s corrobora-
tive relationship with neoliberalism, which arguably laid the ideological-
affective groundwork for the instinctual and selective mobilization of
sport by the Trump agenda. However, before getting to unpack the
politicized and politicizing nature of contemporary sport, the first two
chapters of the book introduce the conceptual and theoretical approach
to uber-sport extended throughout the project, and outline the ontolog-
ical complexity and in-determinacy of late capitalist uber-sport. Having
established this analytical groundwork, it will then be possible to move
into discussions (Chapters 3 and 4) illuminating uber-sport’s contribution
to the instantiation of both US neoliberalism and Trump’s authoritarian
populist campaigning and presidential performativity. This unpacking of
the politics of contemporary sport culture is followed by a conclusion
explicating the points and possibilities for political opposition developed
within and through uber-sport, both in response to the machinations of
neoliberalism in general, and the orchestrations of the Trump regime in
particular. Less an overt contribution to the “teeming shelf of Trump-
lit” (McCrum, 2018), the book seeks to understand the politicized and
politicizing nature and influence of contemporary sport, a brief that,
for now, leads unavoidably to a detour through the sporting aspects of
Trump’s America.
This project is informed by the work of numerous critical scholars
who have examined the role of modern sport in expressing, and reinforc-
ing, prevailing political ideologies (i.e., Brohm, 1978; Brownell, 1995;
Gruneau, 1983, 2017; Hargreaves, 1986; Hoberman, 1984; Hoch,
1972; Ingham, 1982; Perelman, 2012; Rigauer, 1969; Whannel, 2008).
Albeit with different emphases, each of these scholars scrutinized the
institutional and experiential manifestations of modern sport (be they
anchored within early, mid, or late capitalist, socialist, or communist for-
mations), as vehicles of the political ideologies that authorize the power
and influence of dominant groupings, relations, and hierarchies within
specific societies. According to McDonald (2009, p. 43), the collec-
tive influence of these works was “winning the argument that sport is
political: that there is a politics of sport and there is politics in sport.”
The politics of/in sport genie has been irrevocably decamped from the
bottle in which it previously resided (Burneko, 2018). Even the main-
stream US media landscape—a cultural setting that long exhibited a
unilateral and commercially strategic disavowal of any sport-politics
4 D. L. ANDREWS

relation—now advances its cultural acuity through event-embellishing

nods to topical identity politics issues within sport. Oftentimes through
the depiction of the personal journeys and struggles of athletes (par-
ticularly in regard to challenging raced, classed, abled, gendered, and/
or sexed structures of dominance in/through sport), the micro-politics
of sport are routinely engaged as part of the popular representation of a
sports event, or the focus sports-related news, features, and/or commen-
taries. Conversely, discussions of sporting macro-politics—the relation-
ship between sport and broader systems, forces, and ideologies of societal
organization and governance—continue to be subsumed under the cul-
tural weight of formulaic and anodyne popular sport discourse. Within
the US, if acknowledged at all, the macro-politics of sport is usually only
discussed in relation to external sport settings (as in the macro-political
contextualization of sporting mega-event host locations, most often when
the host nation fails to adhere to the normalized precepts of neoliberal
democracy, i.e., Beijing 2008, Sochi 2014, Russia 2018, Beijing 2022,
and Qatar 2022). So, there exists a discernible suspension of macro-
political sporting consciousness related to the US context, as if sport and
macro-politics interpenetrate only on foreign playing fields, and not on
the reified gridiron, baseball diamond, ice rink, or hardwood floor.
Through a critical explication of the politics of uber-sport—and
informed by a cultural studies’ commitment to attempting to under-
stand, thereby generating knowledge informing interventions into, the
relations of popular culture and power (Bennett, 1992; Chen, 1996)—
this project looks to interrupt sport’s largely undisturbed role as a mul-
ti-faceted agent of macro-political reproduction within the US. Both
materially and expressively, uber-sport advances, and simultaneously nor-
malizes, the capitalist-neoliberal-nationalist institutions, interests, and
ideologies governing all facets of contemporary life, and which provided
a solid political-economic-cultural foundation for the rise of Donald
Trump to the presidency. Pace Jameson, this project is rooted in a com-
mitment to the “political perspective…as the absolute horizon of all
reading and all interpretation,” and dependent upon “ideological anal-
ysis” as its “critical ‘method’” (Jameson, 2002, pp. 1, xii). I thus aim
to avoid crafting a “banal and predictable” (Grossberg, 2018, p. xiv)
contemporary analysis of the sport-politic relation, by offering an
exploratory exegesis of uber-sport’s relationship to contemporary poli-
tics, specifically its place within, and influence upon, the popular poli-
tics of Trump’s America. Following an ontologically grounded critical
 1 INTRODUCTION: UBER-SPORT AS CULTURE INDUSTRY 5

exposition (countering Latour’s (2004) antagonistic dichotomizing of

cultural criticism and ontological realism), I engage uber-sport as an
empirical vehicle for generating to the type of contextual work that pro-
vides “a better understanding of where ‘we’ are so ‘we’ can get some-
where else, hopefully somewhere better” (Grossberg, 1997, p. 254),
both regarding uber-sport and America more generally. Not that this is
aligning with a Trumpian call to “Make America Great Again,” just a
recognition of the need to make uber-sport ergo America, better than it
actually is.

Situating Uber-Sport
From kindergaten to retirement home, bar room to board room, beauty
salon to barbershop, The New York Times to Instagram, and all spaces
in between, the US is generally considered to be a sport-obsessed soci-
ety. Indeed, sport could be considered one of the more unquestioned
aspects of the nation’s heavily mythologized sense of self. The natu-
ralized relationship between sport and national belonging/identity
infuses every aspect and level of sport culture, from participating in the
embodied performance of Americana that is recreational youth base-
ball; filling out one’s March Madness bracket; supporting the US wom-
en’s national soccer team; to viewing the NFL Super Bowl’s spectacular
ritual celebration of nationhood. Nevertheless, recent downward trends
in sport spectatorship, viewership, readership, and participation ques-
tion entrenched assumptions regarding the popularity of sport within US
society (Bogage, 2017; Lansner, 2017). Given such wavering metrics,
one wonders whether sport’s popularity is as robust as is generally pre-
sumed. Intuitively, this may appear an absurd proposition. The cultural
prominence of sport within the contemporary US (as measured by its
material and expressive prevalence within the spaces, rhythms, and expe-
riences of everyday life) surely refutes any serious questioning of its pop-
ularity. However, perhaps the US is less organically sport-obsessed than it
is artificially conditioned into thinking of and celebrating itself as being.
This is precisely the argument advanced herein: sport’s popular cultural
centrality and prominence having been commandeered, and increasingly
exploited, by the preoccupations and prescriptions of contemporary cap-
italism. That is not to deny the very real pleasure (for many participants
and spectators alike) derived from sporting involvement, investment, and
identification: Competition-based physical performances can engender
6 D. L. ANDREWS

levels of positive sensory and emotive experience found within few, if

any, other aspects of contemporary culture. In Ritzer’s neo-Weberian
terms, sport is a rare phenomenon whose magical qualities can enchant
the (consuming) public by bringing meaning, substance, and pleasure
to people’s lives, but whose concerted (economic, technological, and
political) rationalization threatens to compromise these magical qualities
and induce experiences of sporting disenchantment (Ritzer & Stillman,
2001).
Within a late capitalist society dominated and defined by conjoined
economic, social, cultural, technological, and political forces (Jameson,
1998), professional/elite sport’s location at the center of US society is
not natural, nor even guaranteed. Rather, sports position of prominence
requires continuous cultivation by a complex and collusive ­network of
commercially driven parties. Paraphrasing and expanding the reach of
Layden’s (2018) critique of the mythologizing of football as the une-
quivocal and fiercely defended “best of America,” professional/elite
sport in the US is an androcentric ecosystem whose aggressively man-
ufactured sense of masculine self-importance renders it immune to
“anything that stands in its way.” This includes the potentially damaging,
yet in some cases rationalized, corollaries of elite/professional sport (i.e.,
on-field violence toward self and others, bullying and belittling coaching
practices, short- and long-term detrimental health outcomes for many
elite athletes, and performance enhancing drug use) and wider societal
problems generating greater visibility when perpetrated by high-profile
sport figures (i.e., various criminal indiscretions, spousal abuse, sexual
exploitation of the vulnerable, and recreational drug use). Additionally,
as Travers pointed out, elite/professional sport is fundamentally
anti-democratic and unjust, in that it is built upon, normalizes, and so
reproduces, patriarchal relations in a manner that “goes virtually unno-
ticed” (Travers, 2008, p. 79). While accommodating, if in marginaliz-
ing and often trivializing ways, female sport and athletes, the US sport
formation institutionally centers dominant and dominating forms of
embodied masculinity by elevating “sports that entail explosive physical
power and domination expressed through aggressive bodily contact and
collision. In other words, we most highly value and reward those sports
that express the most extreme possibilities of male bodies” (Messner,
2002, pp. 145–146). Despite periodic, and oftentimes sensationalist,
coverage of these issues—and acknowledging the NFL’s attempts to
quell growing unease with the sport by instituting rule changes designed
 1 INTRODUCTION: UBER-SPORT AS CULTURE INDUSTRY 7

to make it more safe, or marketing campaigns designed to make it more

gender inclusive—sport has been able to circumvent any long-term or
meaningful questioning of its cultural importance. Up to this point in
time, the masculinist world of elite/professional sport has yet to be the
subject of a concerted moral panic that would come anywhere near com-
promising its cultural centrality and import. This can be attributed to
the fact that, in the familiar discourse of global financial crises—and van-
guard by “king” football’s morphing into “Brand NFL” (Oriard, 2001,
2007)—US professional sport has evolved into a complex enterprise, an
ecosystem, too big to fail; it is a gargantuan economic and cultural institu-
tion so densely interconnected to its various investor/investee armatures
that its demise would prove devastating to the US formation as currently
commercialized and experienced. The structure, effects, and expectations
of a commercially driven and defined US society thus (re)produces a top-
down model, and largely unquestioned mantra, of heightened sporting
importance, which stimulates as it simulates sport’s popular appeal. The
nation’s storied love of sport is, at least in part, an enduring self-fulfilling
prophecy advanced by the myriad armatures of commercial culture
(including, but not restricted to: sport organizations; mass media; social
media; the advertising industry; and, fast food and beverage, and equip-
ment, apparel, and footwear sectors), whose vested economic interests lie
in propagating the notion and experience of the US sport fixation.
Before further illuminating the intricacies of contemporary elite/pro-
fessional sport industry, it is first necessary to being to delineate the pre-
cise understanding of sport utilized and developed within this project.
Gruneau (2017, p. 63) discussed modern sport’s evolution as its “own
object” within eighteenth-century England, and late n ­ ineteenth-century
Europe more generally. At this time, an array of previously highly local-
ized pre-modern, competitive, pleasurable, and expressive physical
cultural practices became consciously objectified by various elites (social,
commercial, and military), into a relatively narrow range of ration-
alized, standardized, and (ultimately) globalized team and individ-
ual sport forms. As modern sport became self-reflexively manufactured
through the prescribed structures, practices, and values of its architects
so, in a Bourdieuian sense, the modern sport system emerged as a “dis-
tinctive field of practice” (Gruneau, 2017, p. 4). As with other cultural
institutions, sport hegemonies (the unquestioned, taken-for-granted
dominance of particular sport forms or systems) are rarely established.
Instead, and despite periodic attempts to ascribe it with “certain inherent
8 D. L. ANDREWS

properties or qualities,” sport’s precise content and meaning are as sub-

ject to change as the social context in which it is situated (Gruneau,
2017, p. 4). As with other popular cultural forms, the prevailing ­formal
operation and definition of sport is thus dependent on the state of play
of power and power relations (social, cultural, economic, political, and/
or technological) operating at any given time (Hall, 1981). Rather
than possessing some “timeless formal essence” in terms of materiality
and representation, sport is an inescapably fluid and malleable popular
cultural formation shaped by the interplay between popular practices
and passions, and the determinant effects of contextual institutions,
forces, and relations (Gruneau, 2017, p. 4). Sport’s precise formation
and meaning is contingent on its articulation to, and through, domi-
nant structures, forces, and values, be they eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century “discourses about English national character, appropriate moral
behavior, and legitimate uses of time, space, and the human body”; the
“masculine, upper- and middle-class, white and western colonial” orien-
tation of late nineteenth-century Europe and North America (Gruneau,
2017, pp. 94, 132); or, most pertinent to the current discussion, the
conflated economic, political, and cultural realms of twenty-first century
consumption-driven late capitalism (Mandel, 1998) responsible for the
operation of “professional sports as primarily entertainment businesses”
(Szymanski, 2010, p. xii).
Within the contemporary US context, an amalgam of corporate capi-
talism, consumer culture, neoliberalism, and nationalism frames the con-
stitution and experience of professional sport as a mass entertainment
product referred to herein as uber-sport. Uber-sport is plainly not a term
used by either producers or consumers of sports (as it is generally referred
to in the American vernacular), even though there is a widespread recog-
nition of many of the constituent processes and elements underpinning
the uber-sport configuration. As such, the reader may very well question
uber-sport’s descriptive or interpretive value as the empirical frame for this
project. In a Saussurean (1959) sense, advancing the concept of uber-
sport is a conscious attempt to identify an “object of study” for critical
sport scholars that renders visible the contextual contingency and onto-
logical complexity of the contemporary sport formation. In previous
discussions, I have utilized the concept of “corporate sport” (Andrews,
2006, 2009), a term I no longer find sufficiently explicative. Uber-
sport encompasses the concerted reformation of elite/professional level
physically based contests by the late capitalist processes of: replicative
 1 INTRODUCTION: UBER-SPORT AS CULTURE INDUSTRY 9

corporatization (institutional and management reorganization designed

to realize profit-driven structures and logics); expansive commercializa-
tion (sport brand diversification and non-sport brand promotion across
multiple sectors); creative spectacularization (entertainment-focused
delivery of popular sport spectacles, realized through a combination of
structural reformation and cross-platform mass mediation); and intensive
celebritization (sporting contests constructed around, and a site for the
embellishment of, specific public persona). Uber-sport thus describes a
highly rationalized, diversified, yet integrated popular sport phenomenon
designed to generate mass audiences/markets, and thereby popularity/
profits, across an array of culturally and economically multiplying streams
(products, bodies, services, and spaces).
Of course, uber-sport is nothing more than what Braudel (1982, p.
459) referred to as an explanatory device, involving the strategic “carv-
ing up” and representation of reality as a means of privileging a discrete
empirical focus (in this case: the complex system of highly rationalized
and standardized high-profile, elite, and/or professional team and indi-
vidual physically based contests) for the purpose of socio-historic exege-
sis. Not that this preoccupation with uber-sport falls foul of the lack of
humility Grossberg (2010) identified within some, more self-important,
expressions of sectorally-focused cultural studies. Uber-sport is no more
or less “crucially central” than other strategically abstracted sectors of
socio-cultural analysis (be it the economy, religion, the mass media, med-
icine, or technology, etc.) or other realms of popular culture (i.e., music,
dance, cinema, television, social media, and fashion); this is certainly
no assertion that uber-sport is what the contemporary cultural critic has
“been searching for all along” (Grossberg, 2010, p. 19), as a means of
truly understanding the contemporary moment. Nonetheless, this pro-
ject is based on the assertion that uber-sport matters—it is something we
should “give a damn about”—since it is a pervasive and emotive realm of
popular existence whereupon the “struggle for and against a culture of
the powerful is engaged” (Hall, 1981, p. 239). A “structured assemblage
of practices,” uber-sport reveals many of the complexities of the “con-
text in which it is constituted” (Grossberg, 2010, p. 25). It is a com-
pound extraction/abstraction, incorporating various empirical elements,
and delineating a coherent object of inquiry, facilitating the identification
and interpretation of important dialectic forces, relations, and “problems
effectively” (Braudel, 1982, p. 459). As Schumpeter famously noted in
relation to economics, society is an “indivisible whole,” meaning despite
10 D. L. ANDREWS

the artificial extractions/abstractions by economists, a phenomenon,

entity, or “fact” can never be “exclusively or purely economic; other–and
often more important–aspects always exist” (Schumpeter, 2017 [1934],
p. 3). Uber-sport is multiply, indivisibly, and constitutively linked to other
“aspects”: It is anything but an exclusively or purely sporting phenome-
non, and, importantly, it doesn’t exist in isolation from myriad other ele-
ments of the “indivisible whole” with which it is complexly interrelated.
As expounded within this and subsequent chapters, the conjoined
processes of corporatization, commercialization, spectacularization, and
celebritization have projected the uber-sport estate beyond the narrow
confines of the traditional sport event. Redolent of the late capitalist
order, sectoral convergence within the consumption-oriented econ-
omy (Jameson, 1998) has blurred the boundaries between sport, and—
among other sectors of popular commercial culture—fashion, music,
film, advertising, fast food, traditional, and social media. Increasingly,
each is indivisible from the other, such that sport is now engaged and
experienced in myriad material and expressive commodified forms, all of
which coalesce to form the empirically diverse and broad-ranging uber-
sport phenomenon. Yet, what is uber about uber-sport? Utilizing uber—as
a prefix, and invoking über’s German meaning (the umlaut consciously
dropped to denote the American Anglicization of the term [as in Uber
Technologies Inc., the self-styled leader in the so-called sharing econ-
omy] and the Americanized nature of uber-sport itself), uber-sport sig-
nifies the highest, superlative, or consummate sport form (in its literal
German sense, above the rest). If sport in its most generic sense refers to
the structure and practice of physically based contests between individ-
uals or collectives, uber-sport is the term utilized within this project to
refer to the currently idealized model of corporatized-commercialized-
spectacularized-celebritized sport culture, the hegemonic blueprint for
the structure, delivery, and diversified consumptive experience of elite/
professional sport.
Cast as the consummate/superior mode of sport organization, uber-
sport possesses a cultural authority prescribed by dutiful industry advo-
cates as a matter of course, and in a manner that effectively renders
other modes of sport structure and delivery as sub-optimal/inferior.
Pace Fukuyama (1989), there is presently no perceived alternative to the
uber-sport model within a social formation propelled by corporate struc-
tures, commercial logics, and spectacular processes. Uber-sport’s objec-
tification is internally validated by various sport business publications,
 1 INTRODUCTION: UBER-SPORT AS CULTURE INDUSTRY 11

outlets, and conferences, all of which contribute to the establishment

of industry best practice. Similarly, the fecund academic disciple of sport
management (with 400 sport management undergraduate and graduate
programs in the US alone) constructs uber-sport as one of its core objects
of inquiry, thereby sensitizing its legions of graduates to the centrality
of the model within their future professional lives (Newman, 2014). As
a consequence, uber-sport is (re)created as “its own object” (Gruneau,
2017, p. 63)—and as the way elite sport formations are expected to
operate and exist within late capitalist society—by those working within
the industry. Moreover, the material and representational instantiation of
uber-sport has, in a tautological sense, become a normalized and normal-
izing agent in the lived experience of spectators, viewers, and consum-
ers alike. So, within the US, the prevalence of the uber-sport form and
function is evident across major sport organizations, leagues, and events
(such as those linked to the ATP, LPGA, NASCAR, MLB, MLS, NBA,
NFL, NHL, PGA, UFC, WNBA, and the WTA). Pointing to its ubiq-
uity, uber-sport is clearly a trans-sport mode of institutional structure and
delivery. However, its ubiquity is not restricted to sport within the US.
Uber-sport is also a trans-national phenomenon: the spread of cultur-
ally oriented late capitalism propelling the global diffusion of the uber-
sport model (Andrews & Ritzer, 2007) across national (i.e., Australian
National Rugby League, English Premier League, and Indian Premier
League) and trans-national sport organizations (i.e., the IOC, FIFA,
ATP, IAAF, FIBA, or FIA). Through the global circulation, exchange,
and surveillance of uber-sport products, information, and expertise, uber-
sport has been established as the sport industry standard around the
world. The architecture, values, and practices of uber-sport are every bit
in evidence in the hyperbolically named Chinese Super League, Super
Rugby, or Australian Suncorp Super Netball League, as they are in the
NFL, WNBA, or NASCAR.
Akin to the emergence and development of the highly rationalized
fast food industry, with its distinctively American provenance (Ritzer,
2011)—and unsurprisingly since the US was the crucible of contem-
porary consumer capitalism and culture—so the corporatization, com-
mercialization, spectacularization, and celebritization of sport transpired
first within the US. Encumbered by this American patina, locally man-
ifest expressions of uber-sport are perceived, oftentimes pejoratively, as
symptomatic of the latest phase in the Americanization of local sport
cultures. While the global diffusion of the uber-sport model brings
12 D. L. ANDREWS

with it a degree of American-derived homogenization—specifically in

terms of institutional objectives and infrastructure—it is far from a uni-
versal monolith. The shape of the ball, the nature of the physical con-
test, cast of characters on display, or litany of corporate sponsors differs
even if the mode, means, and relations of uber-sport production remain
unerringly similar. Uber-sport has emerged as a truly trans-national
­phenomenon, existing simultaneously in multiple settings around globe:
existing globally, but operating in within the language of the sporting
local. Uber-sport institutions consciously mobilize the particularities of
the local sport marketplace (be they metropolitan, regional, or national
scales), in looking to engage and animate consumer consciousness and
behavior at the local level. Although not a word used in common par-
lance, uber-sport thus represents a condition of formulated ubiety:
a state of being or existence derived from location in a given time or
space, a whereness. Hence, uber-sport is both global and local, ubiquitous
and ubietous.
This project is premised on the assertion that the rise of Donald
Trump was, to some degree, aided and abetted by uber-sport’s localized
popular cultural presence, meaning, and influence in the US context.
Within this moment, uber-sport served as a surreptitious proxy, unobtru-
sively articulating the ideological and affective orientations bolstering the
Trump campaign’s (and subsequently administration’s) populist agenda.
In a general sense, sport qua sport is by not necessarily an overtly polit-
ical phenomenon, however, uber-sport can be considered such, given
its location within the contemporary political-economic conjuncture.
Despite not being widely acknowledged as such, uber-sport has long been
unavoidably articulated to, and through, the enmeshed corporate capi-
talist, neoliberal, and nationalist forces that dominate life within early
twenty-first century US. As a political phenomenon at the confluence of
capitalism, neoliberalism, and nationalism, the Trump project thereby
benefitted from uber-sport’s concealed yet effective popular politicization.
So, why are the politics of the contemporary sporting landscape largely
ignored? Why is there seemingly a willing suspension of political insight
when it comes to uber-sport? Perhaps answers lie in the fact that, as with
many cultural institutions—but perhaps more so because of its affective
resonance and established popular appeal—sport is habitually subject
to the process of reification. Despite its implicit whereness or ubiety, in
whatever contingent iteration, sport is routinely reified by being ascribed
a sense of independent materiality or thingness which, to the popular
 1 INTRODUCTION: UBER-SPORT AS CULTURE INDUSTRY 13

imagination, constitutes it as a coherent formation, separate and distinct

from the rest of society.
Sporting reification is politically problematic since it obscures the
broader social forces, processes, and relations that shape the struc-
ture and experience of sport, and which are simultaneously articulated
through the reified confines of the sport formation. Sport and society are
dialectically implicated in their mutual co-constitution and reified sport
acts as a stealthy agent of societal conformity, covertly reproducing the
status quo, and therefore the political ideologies and interests of domi-
nant groupings within society. Of course, uber-sport has been the focus
of some not inconsiderably counter-reifying impulses, specifically those
related to the widespread, if sometimes lamented, recognition of sport
as big business. Nevertheless, uber-sport remains a highly reified phenom-
enon: there being a multitude of—oftentimes vehemently repudiated—
contextual forces, relations, and effects articulated to, and through,
uber-sport. Clearly, more work needs to be done to conclusively expose
the ingrained political (and correlated cultural and economic) relations
and effects of uber-sport. An important starting point (though definitely
not an end point, since this project extends and augments its theoretical
reach in subsequent chapters) for a concerted politically focused coun-
ter-reifying of uber-sport is a revisiting of the approach to critical the-
orizing associated with the Frankfurt School. Although perhaps not as
coherent or consistent as analyses such as this suggest, the work emanat-
ing from scholars linked to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research
provides a useful framework for critically discerning the politicized/
politicizing nature of uber-sport, particularly as it contributed to both
the normalizing of neoliberalism as the defining ideology of late twenti-
eth-century/early twenty-first-century US society, and to the subsequent
institutional empowerment of Trumpism (Grossberg, 2018).

(Re)Turning to Frankfurt
Speaking in January 2018, Boston Celtic basketball star Jaylen Brown
observed “sports is a mechanism of control. If people didn’t have sports
they would be a lot more disappointed with their role in society. There
would be a lot more anger or stress about the injustice of poverty and
hunger.” (McRae, 2018). Whether or not Brown has directly encoun-
tered the works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Fromm, Marcuse
et al., there is little denying his insight draws parallels with Frankfurt
14 D. L. ANDREWS

School approaches to commercialized culture as a mechanism of mass

manipulation, deception, and conformity. There are, of course, numer-
ous examples of Frankfurt School-informed analysis of modern sport cul-
ture (c.f. Alt, 1983; Brohm, 1978; Grano, 2017; Gruneau, 2017; Inglis,
2004; McDonald, 2007, 2009; Morgan, 1998; Perelman, 2012). The
work emanating from the Frankfurt School (and, by implication, these
sport-focused derivatives) has long been criticized for its cultural elitism,
intellectual pessimism, and political impotence; exponents of the pro-
ject were famously described by Hungarian Marxist philosopher György
Lukács as residing complacently in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” (Lukács,
1971a, p. 22). Nonetheless, despite its perception among certain cir-
cles as a haughty and anachronistic intellectual backwater, there is con-
siderable value in revisiting, and subsequently extending, the theoretical
insights of the Frankfurt School as a starting point for this critical exam-
ination of the politics of the contemporary (sporting) moment. As Alex
Ross’ (2016) essay in The New Yorker stated, “The Frankfurt School
knew Trump was coming.” Certainly, the prescience of much Frankfurt
School theorizing informs this analysis of the relationship between uber-
sport as a popular culture industry, the politics of neoliberal America, and
Trump’s cacophonous political-cultural-economic project.
While Ross (2016) declared “Trump is as much a pop-culture phe-
nomenon as he is a political one,” a critical theory reading of Ross’
Twitter-friendly, click-bait observation asserts that Donald Trump’s pop-
ular culture presence is indivisible from his political persona. Adopting
an approach informed by the Frankfurt School thus illuminates the
politicized and politicizing nature of commercially mass-mediated pop-
ular culture. As Gruneau (2017, p. 157) adroitly observed, “In a world
increasingly influenced by internet memes, ‘fake news,’ and powerful cul-
tures of celebrity, critical theory’s emphasis on the fusion of authoritari-
anism, economic inequality, and popular cultural distraction seems more
relevant than ever.” Interestingly, despite being spurred by divergent
political aims, both Trump and Adorno’s styles of analysis and address
are rooted in hyperbole, outrageousness, and calculated overstatement.
Trump utilized this approach as part of his populist paranoia-inducing
“shock doctrine” (Klein, 2008), whereas Adorno crafted consciously
constructed dystopian exaggerations as “‘shock-tactics’…intended
to compel the reader to think in ways very different from accustomed
(and hence dominated) modes of thought” (Inglis, 2004, p. 89). For
Adorno, and indeed many Frankfurt School theorists, the construction
 1 INTRODUCTION: UBER-SPORT AS CULTURE INDUSTRY 15

of dystopian visions looked to stimulate the realization of utopian possi-

bilities. So, while parts of this project may be read as unremittingly bleak
interpretations of the uber-sport present, this approach is similarly moti-
vated to challenge the political complacency of conventional thinking
in the hope of contributing toward the realization of a more progres-
sive future for uber-sport, and for the society with which it is dialectically
implicated.
Founded in 1923, and affiliated with the University of Frankfurt am
Main (now the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main),
the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung)
developed as an intellectual response to the cultural, economic, and politi-
cal evolution of post-World War I Germany (Arato, Gebhardt, & Piccone,
1982). Encompassing a diverse agglomeration of thinkers—largely, but
not exclusively, Marxist in theoretical orientation—the institute initially
sought to explain: the failure of the German socialist revolution in 1919;
the establishment and operation of the Weimar Republic; and the subse-
quent emergence and rise to power of National Socialism within a mod-
ern capitalist state. Frankfurt School theorists examined the myriad ways
modern capitalism led to the enslavement of populations by commingled
and ensnaring economic, political, technological, social, and cultural insti-
tutions, forces, and logics. This focus on the rise of mass-produced com-
mercial culture in the development of the totalizing regime of modern
capitalism was initially addressed within the context of late 1920s and
early 1930s Germany, but was later accented following the wholesale relo-
cation of the institute and many associated scholars to the US in 1935,
a self-imposed exile precipitated by the brazen and increasingly violent
anti-Semitism that had enveloped Germany by that time.
The US provided the Frankfurt School with a social laboratory
within which to study modern consumer capitalism in its most advanced
form. Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse et al. were confronted
by a complex modern society, wherein all its constituent elements had
become colonized by highly mechanized, standardized, and rationalized
capitalist processes and institutions. Less operating “in the service of a
particular dominant class”—though particular groups benefit immeasur-
ably more than others—Frankfurt School theorists identified how power
now resides and operates in the “interests of the overall System” (Inglis,
2004, p. 83). This “total power of capital” (Horkheimer & Adorno,
2002, p. 94) led to the dominance of an instrumental rationality com-
promising individual freedom and creativity, by treating people as objects
16 D. L. ANDREWS

to be manipulated and controlled in the pursuit of capital accumulation.

The once (semi)autonomous cultural realm was now fully integrated
into the capitalist economy, divided into interrelated industrialized
sub-sectors, or “culture industries” (Horkheimer, 1972), each of which
mirrored the profit-driven structures and logics of more established
industrial domains (Bernstein, 2001). Presaging later insights regard-
ing the culturally totalizing nature of late capitalism, Horkheimer and
Adorno pointed to the homogenizing influences of the culture indus-
tries under conditions of intensifying monopoly capitalism: “Culture
today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines
form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous with itself and all
are unanimous together” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, p. 94). Each of
these cultural formations has succumbed to capitalism’s overdetermining
instrumental rationality, meaning individually and collectively the culture
industries serve to normalize, in a manner that renders largely impercep-
tible, the total power of capital.
Adorno, who by 1939 already described himself in a letter to his par-
ents as their “America-weary child” (Adorno, 2006, p. 6), was both
transfixed and profoundly troubled by the nature and influence of US
cultural capitalism. This latter sentiment is captured in his description
of the culture industries as manufacturing “up-to-date propaganda”
(Adorno, 2001, p. 48) nurturing a political passivity among the general
populace. In fashioning a consumptively oriented “degraded utopia of
the present” (Bernstein, 2001, p. 14)—the materially and expressively
comforting nature of which suppresses the impulse to “escape from the
whole infantile milieu” (Adorno, 2001, p. 47)—the cultural industries
(advertising, film, music, and sport et al.) strengthen the “blind, opaque
authority” of the dominant capitalist order (Adorno, 2001, p. 105).
The corollary is a largely docile and superficially contented populace.
Any potentially disruptive mass mobilizations against economic, politi-
cal, and/or social unfreedoms (Adorno, 1978) are effectively defused by
the consumer freedoms (needs and desires) constructed within and sati-
ated by the culture industries. In political terms, the pacifying capacities
of culture industries contribute to the stability, and largely unquestioned
continuation, of the democratic capitalist formation. Here is the “mass
deception” of the culture industries to which Horkheimer and Adorno
referred (2002). Despite not appearing in this guise—masquerading as
they do behind a veil of popular pleasure and desire—the cultural indus-
tries are thus pivotal cogs in the workings of the dominant political order.
 1 INTRODUCTION: UBER-SPORT AS CULTURE INDUSTRY 17

Illuminating the “oppressive conformism” and attendant political

conservatism of the culture industries (Bernstein, 2001, p. 14), Adorno
iterated, “The concoctions of the culture industry are neither guides for
a blissful life, nor a new art of moral responsibility, but rather exhorta-
tions to toe the line, behind which stand the most powerful interests”
(2001, p. 105). This brings to light what Frankfurt School thinkers con-
sidered to be another fundamental liberal deceit of the culture industries,
and of late capitalism more generally: The illusion of individual freedom
and individuality (or “pseudo-individualization” [Adorno, 1990, p.
261]) proffered by the structure and delivery of consumer capitalism that
actually masks its function as a purveyor of cultural conformity and dom-
ination (“unfreedom” [Adorno, 1978]). The freedom of choice “halo”
(Adorno, 1990, p. 261) represented by the consumer marketplace is an
illusion on two levels: first, because consumer choice is necessarily con-
strained by the range of goods and services on offer; second, because
such consumer freedoms obscure the lack of freedom, or agency, expe-
rienced by those incorporated into the bonded labor relations enacted
by debt-financed consumption. According to this logic, industrialized
culture—of which the uber-sport culture industry is a vivid example—is
less an organic expression of a particular way of life, and more a system
for manufacturing conformity to consumer culture, and, crucially, to the
democratic political order inextricably tied to the sustenance of the con-
sumer capitalist system.
As vehicles of a form of populist cultural authoritarianism—what
Inglis (2004) refers to as a quasi-totalitarianism—the cultural indus-
tries (including uber-sport) present normalized/normalizing affective
reactions to, and meanings and identities associated with, their cultural
products to the consuming populace. As an example, Adorno (2006,
p. 6) remarked upon the authoritarian tendencies of commercial radio,
which he described as the “snake that bites its own tail” for dictating—
through the mobilization of vast advertising budgets and campaigns—
that deemed to be, and experienced as being, popular, since the “public
has long since lost all say in the matter” (Adorno, 2006, p. 93). This
subsumption of the individual into the machinery of modern capital-
ism points to the overarching instrumental rationality driving a “cycle
of manipulation and retroactive need…unifying the system ever more
tightly” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, p. 95). Not that the output of
the culture industries can be considered conclusively impositional or
manipulative. As Hall (1981, pp. 232, 233) stated, “ordinary people are
18 D. L. ANDREWS

not cultural dopes.” Rather, the culture industries continually “rework

and reshape what they represent,” always looking to resonate with what
are changing views and values of the “dominant or preferred culture”
(Hall, 1981, p. 233). Fearful of alienating mainstream (read: mass and
thereby profitable) audiences, commercial cultural producers recognize
the need to represent generally recognizable—if anodyne—experiences,
attitudes, and aspirations within their output. Consumer markets, identi-
ties, and desires are nonetheless manufactured and managed, as opposed
to being dutifully addressed by commercial interests. In his later recon-
sideration of the culture industries, Adorno noted:

although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and

unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses
are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an append-
age of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry
would have us believe, not its subject but its object. (Adorno, 2001, p. 99,
italics added)

Within this manipulative system, the consuming individual is treated—

even if they do not always act—as a “standardized part of the commodity
producing machine” (Abbinnett, 2006, pp. 25–26).
At the conceptual and political core of Frankfurt School thinking was
the need to understand, and counter, the process of reification under-
pinning the structure and experience of modernity. Informed by Lukács
(1971b), Horkheimer and Adorno construed the capitalist-driven reifi-
cation of society as involving the abstraction or separation of an entity/
commodity from the social forces, processes, and relations responsible
for its instantiation, and for the attribution of an independent materi-
ality or concreteness to that entity/commodity. As the “universal cat-
egory of society as a whole” (Lukács, 1971b, p. 86), the commodity
and commodity relations become “crucial for the subjugation of men’s
[sic] consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expres-
sion” (Lukács, 1971b, p. 86). Reification effectively obscures the pre-
vailing social forces responsible for shaping society and its constituent
elements, and thereby isolates—or separates—individuals from the con-
sciousness or experience of the social totality. In the face of the perva-
sive presence and invasive power of the reifying culture industries—and
whether through indifference, ambivalence, or perceived futility—con-
sumers habitually conform to the prevailing, nonetheless oppressive,
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 CHAPTER VI

Arrival in London. Conditions I found there. Preparations and Start.

reached London very early next morning, and drove

directly to the lodgings of my friend, Mr. Wellington
Lee, the only American resident in London whom I
knew. These were on a short street extending from the
Strand down to the river, a short distance west of
Temple Bar, the ancient city gate, which was then
standing. Who was Mr. Lee and what was he doing in London?
These were questions in which I had an interest of which I was as
yet entirely ignorant. The firm of Lee & Larned were the first
successful designers of steam fire-engines in this country. More than
seventy of these steamers had been built from their plans and under
their direction by the Novelty Iron Works in New York, and the fire
department of that city was completely equipped with them. One of
their engines had been sold to the city of Havre, and Mr. Lee had
gone over with it to test it publicly on its guaranteed performance. Mr.
Amos, one of the senior members of the great London engineering
firm of Easton, Amos & Sons, went over to Havre to witness this trial,
with a view to the manufacture of these steam fire-engines in
London. He was so much pleased that he determined to make the
fire-engines, and engaged Mr. Lee to take the direction of their
manufacture. So it came to pass that at this particular time Mr. Lee
was in London superintending the first manufacture of his steam fire-
engines by this firm.
After our salutations Mr. Lee said: “First of all I have something to
tell you.” Before relating this, I must mention something that I knew
before I sailed. About the time when the cargo of United States
exhibits started, the well-known Mason and Slidell incident occurred.
These gentlemen, commissioners sent by the Confederacy to
represent their cause before European governments, had sailed on a
British vessel flying the British flag. This vessel was overhauled on
the high seas by one of our cruisers, and the commissioners were
taken off and brought prisoners to New York. Mr. Lincoln made haste
to disavow this illegal proceeding, so singularly inconsistent with our
own principles of international law, and to make all the reparation in
his power. But a bitter feeling towards England was then growing in
the Northern States, and in a moment of resentment Congress
hastily passed a resolution repealing the law creating the Exhibition
Commission and making an appropriation for its expenses, and
Secretary Seward issued a proclamation dissolving the commission.
The vessel carrying the exhibits had been gone scarcely more than a
day when this action of Congress and Mr. Seward surprised the
country.
I now take up Mr. Lee’s narrative. The news of this action, carried
by a mail steamer, had reached London several days before the
arrival of the exhibits. Under the pressure of an urgent demand the
Royal Commission confiscated the space allotted to the United
States and parceled it out to British exhibitors. Mr. Holmes on his
arrival found not a spot in the Exhibition buildings on which to set his
foot. But he was a man of resources. He went before the
commission with an eminent Queen’s counsel, who made the point
that they had received no official notification of any such action by
the United States Government, but had proceeded on a mere
newspaper rumor, which they had no right to do; and there was the
United States assistant commissioner with his credentials and a
shipload of exhibits, and they must admit him.
The commissioners yielded most gracefully. They said: “Now, Mr.
Holmes, the American space is gone; we cannot restore that to you,
but there are unoccupied spots all over the Exhibition, and you may
take up any of these, and we will undertake that your whole exhibit
shall be well placed.” Upon this Mr. Holmes had gone to work and
had been able to find locations for every exhibit, except my engine.
 Wellington Lee

“But only yesterday,” said Mr. Lee, “Mr. Holmes learned that an
engine ordered by the commission to drive the British exhibit of
looms, of which there were thirty-three exhibitors, had been
condemned by the superintendent of machinery, Mr. Daniel Kinnear
Clark, and ordered out of the building.” He added that Mr. Holmes
went directly to Mr. Clark and applied for the place for my engine, the
bedplate of which, thanks to my precipitate action, had arrived and
was then on a truck, in England called a lurry, waiting to be
unloaded. In answer to Mr. Clark’s questions, Mr. Holmes had given
him his personal assurance that I would be there, and the rest of the
engine would be there in ample time, and it would be all that he
could possibly desire; and on that assurance he had got the place for
me.
I informed Mr. Lee that I also had something to tell him. I then
gave him the situation as already related. He looked very grave.
When I had finished he said: “Well, you are in a hole, sure enough;
but come, let us get some breakfast, and then we will see what
Easton & Amos can do for you.” After eating my first English mutton-
chop in a chop-house on the Strand, I accompanied Mr. Lee to their
works in the Borough, a long distance away, on the south or Surrey
side of the Thames, to reach which we crossed the Southwark
bridge.
None of the partners had yet reached the office. Very soon Mr.
James Easton arrived. He was a young man about my own age. Mr.
Lee introduced me and told my story. The instant he finished Mr.
Easton came across the room and grasped my hand most cordially.
“That’s the kind of pluck I like,” said he; “we will see you through, Mr.
Porter; we will build this engine for you, whatever else may have to
wait.” Directly he added: “We have a good deal of ‘red tape’ here, but
it won’t do in this case. There will be no time to lose. Come with me.”
He then took me through the shops and introduced me to every
foreman, telling them what he had undertaken to do, and gave each
of them the same instruction, as follows: “Mr. Porter will come
directly to you with his orders. Whatever he wants done, you are to
leave everything else so far as may be necessary, and do his work
as rapidly as possible.”
As I listened to these orders, I could hardly believe my senses or
keep back the tears. Coming on top of the devotion of Mr. Holmes
they nearly overcame me. The sudden relief from the pressure of
anxiety was almost too much. It seemed to me to beat all the fairy
stories I had ever heard. This whole-hearted cordiality of the first
Englishman I had met gave me a high idea of the people as a whole,
which, I am happy to say, a residence of over six years in England
served only to increase.
Returning to the office, we found Mr. Lee, who said, “Now, Mr.
Porter, I think Mr. Holmes would like to see you.” Getting the
necessary directions, in due time I found myself in the Exhibition
building on Cromwell Road and in the presence of Mr. Holmes, who
received me joyfully and led me at once to Mr. Clark’s office. As he
opened the door, Mr. Clark looked up from his desk and exclaimed,
“Good morning, Mr. Holmes; where is that engine?” “Well,” replied
Mr. Holmes, “here is Mr. Porter, and the engine is here or on the
way.” Mr. Clark asked me a number of questions about the engine,
and finally how many revolutions per minute it was intended to make.
I replied, “One hundred and fifty.” I thought it would take his breath
away. With an expression of the greatest amazement he exclaimed:
“What! a hundred and fifty! B—b—b—but, Mr. Porter, have you had
any experience with such a speed as that?” I told him my experience
with the little engine, which did not seem to satisfy him at all. Finally
he closed the matter, or supposed he had done so, by saying: “I
cannot allow such a speed here; I consider it dangerous.” I decided
instantly in my own mind not to throw away all that I had come for;
but I made no sign, but humbly asked what speed I might employ.
After a little consideration Mr. Clark replied: “One hundred and
twenty revolutions; that must not be exceeded.” This he considered a
great concession, the usual speed of stationary engines being from
fifty to sixty revolutions. I meekly acquiesced, then made my plans
for one hundred and fifty revolutions, and said nothing to anybody. I
had no idea of the gravity of my offence. It was the first time since I
was a child that I had been ordered to do or not to do anything, and I
had no conception of orders except as given by myself. If there was
any risk, I assumed it gaily, quite unconscious how such a daredevil
defiance of authority would appear to an Englishman. Mr. Clark
showed me my location, and gave me an order for my engine-bed to
be brought in immediately, and also other parts of the engine as
soon as they arrived. Trucks generally, I was told, had to wait in the
crowd about ten days for their turn to be unloaded.
 Charles T. Porter
A.D. 1862

I hurry over the time of erection. Everything arrived promptly and

the whole came together without a hitch, as I knew it would. The fly-
wheel and pulley and cylinder lagging I had left to be made in
England. I was at the works of Easton, Amos & Sons every morning
at 6 o’clock, and laid out the work for the day. I made the gauges for
boring the fly-wheel and pulley, which I had now learned how to do,
and adjusted everything about the engine myself, and knew it was
right.
I had a talk with the foreman of the pattern-shop about the best
thickness of felt on the cylinder to be covered by the mahogany
lagging, in the course of which I remarked, “It is the air that is the
real non-conductor.” “Yes,” he replied, “and felt, you know, is ‘air’.”
I learned several things I did not know before, among others how
the English made a steam-pipe joint, using parallel threads and a
backing-up nut, packed with long hemp which was filled with a putty
made of red and white lead rubbed together dry.
I had great luck in the way of a driving-belt. An American exhibitor
of india-rubber belting asked the privilege of exhibiting a belt in use
on my engine, which I was glad enough to have him do. Otherwise I
hardly know what I should have done. The widest English belts were
12 inches wide, double, and sewn together from end to end with five
rows of sheepskin lacing. The belt ran on the knobs of this lacing.
English machinists then knew nothing of the hold of belts by
excluding the air. The ends of all belts were united by lapping them
about two feet and sewing them through and through with this same
lacing. Fine pounding these joints would have made on the pulleys. I
got a governor belt from him also. Both belts were united by butt-
joints laced in the American fashion. I did this job myself, and,
indeed, I put the whole engine together mostly with my own hands,
although Easton, Amos & Sons sent two of their best fitters to help
me. I learned afterwards that I should have had a sorry time driving
my governor by a belt laced in the English way.
In spite of all efforts and all our good luck, we were not ready to
start until a week after the opening day, May 1, and the exhibitors
were in despair, for none of them believed that this new-fangled
American trap would work when it did start at the frightful speed of a
hundred and twenty revolutions per minute, which they had learned
from Mr. Clark it was to make. Finally one day after our noon dinner I
turned on the steam, and the governor rose at the speed of one
hundred and fifty revolutions precisely. It was immediately
surrounded by a dense crowd, every man of whom looked as if he
expected the engine to fly in pieces any instant.
It was not more than two minutes after it started when I saw Mr.
Clark coming with his watch in his hand. Some one had rushed to his
office and told him the Yankee engine was running away. The crowd
opened for him, and he came up to the engine and watched it for
some time, walking leisurely around it and observing everything
carefully from all points of view. He then counted it through a full
minute. At its close he turned to me and exclaimed, “Ah, Porter—
but,” slapping me cordially on the shoulder, “it’s all right. If you will
run as smoothly as this you may run at any speed you like.”
And so the high-speed engine was born, but neither Mr. Clark, nor
I, nor any human being then knew what it was that made it run so
smoothly.
I have since realized more and more what a grand man Mr. Clark
then showed himself to be. A small souled man might have regarded
the matter entirely from a personal point of view, and been furious at
my defiance of his authority. There are such men. I will show one to
the reader by and by. Officialism is liable to produce them. I was
quite unconscious of the risk in this respect that I was running. I have
always felt that I could not be too thankful that at this critical point I
fell into the hands of so noble a man as Daniel Kinnear Clark.
Mr. Porter’s Exhibit at the London International Exhibition, 1862
 CHAPTER VII

My London Exhibit, its Success, but what was the matter? Remarkable Sale of the
Engine.

hus, as the result of a remarkable combination of

circumstances, upon which I look back with feelings
more of awe than of wonder, the high-speed system
made its appearance in the London International
Exhibition of 1862, installed in the midst of the British
machinery exhibit, under conditions more
advantageous than any which I could have imagined.
But the engine had a weak feature: it was wanting in an essential
respect, of which I was, and remained to the end, quite unconscious,
as will presently appear. Before entering on this subject I will give the
reader an idea of what the exhibit was like. The accompanying half-
tone from a photograph will, with the help of a little explanation,
make this quite real.
The location was in a narrow space between a side aisle and the
wall of the temporary wooden structure, 300 feet wide by nearly
1000 feet long, which formed the machinery hall. The engine was
crowded closely by looms on both sides. Here were shown together
the first high-speed engine, the first high-speed governor, and the
first high-speed indicator. My marine governor could not be
accommodated there, and had to be shown elsewhere. I was so
much afraid of deflection or vibration of the shaft that I shortened up
the length between the bearings and placed the driving-pulley on the
overhanging end of the shaft, which for the light work to be done
there answered sufficiently well. I showed also the largest and the
smallest sizes of my stationary-engine governors. These were belted
from the shaft to revolve so as to stand always in positions
coincident with those of the governor which regulated the engine.
 On a table between the railing and the head of the engine I
showed mahogany sectional models of the valves at one end of the
cylinder in the engine exhibited, and of the now well-known Allen
slide valve, with double opening for admission made by a passage
over the exhaust-cup.
The Richards indicator is seen placed on the cylinder midway of its
length, and connected by pipes with the ends over the clearances,
so that in the familiar manner by means of a three-way cock the
opposite diagrams could be taken on the same sheet. After a few
days’ use I mistrusted that the lead lines were not correctly drawn,
and I took away these pipes, placing the indicator on the cylinder
itself, at the opposite ends alternately. The diagrams then taken
showed that the error from transmission through these pipes had
been even greater than I had feared. I have, of course, employed the
close connection ever since.
This identifies the time when the photograph was taken. It must
have been within a few days after starting.
The center of the eccentric coinciding with the crank, as already
stated, and the center line of the link being in the same horizontal
plane with that of the engine, I was able to take the motion of the
paper drum from the sustaining arms of the link instead of from the
cross-head. This was very convenient.
During the first two or three weeks the steam pressure was kept
up to 75 pounds, as intended, and I was able to get diagrams cutting
off quite early, which were then erroneously supposed to show
superior economy. But when all the steam-eaters had got in their
work the pressure could not be maintained much above 40 pounds,
and for that exhibition the day of fancy diagrams was over. Gwynne
& Co. showed a large centrifugal pump driven by a pair of engines
which always brought the pressure down at the rate of a pound a
minute. They were not allowed to run longer than fifteen minutes at a
time, but it took a long time after they stopped before the pressure
could be got up again even to 40 pounds. Whenever I took a
diagram somebody was always standing ready to take it away, and
so among my mementoes I have been able to find none cutting off
earlier than the one here represented. On the wall at the back I hung
the largest United States flag I could find, with a portrait of President
Lincoln. This seems all that needs to be said about the photograph
and the diagram.

INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT

1862 DIAGRAM TAKEN FROM 1862
THE ALLEN ENGINE BY THE RICHARDS INDICATOR.
ENGINE, 8 INCHES BY 24 INCHES, REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE, 150.
SCALE, 40 LBS. TO THE INCH.

But what was the matter? I will clear the way to answering this
question by relating the following incident: Six months later, with a
feeling of bitter disappointment, I contemplated my engine standing
alone where the place had been thronged with surging life. All the
other exhibits had been removed. This was left in stillness and
desolation, and I was making up my mind to the necessity of
shipping it home again, its exhibition to all appearance absolutely
fruitless—a failure, which I was utterly at a loss to comprehend,
when I had a call from Mr. James Easton, the same man who had
first welcomed me in England. His firm had perhaps the largest
exhibit in the Machinery Hall, of a waterfall supplied by a centrifugal
pump, and they had been frequent observers of the running of my
engine, which was quite near them. Mr. Easton bluntly asked me if I
thought my engine could be run 50 per cent. faster or at 225
revolutions per minute, because they had concluded that it could be,
and if I agreed with them they had a use for it themselves. Under the
circumstances I did not hesitate long about agreeing with them in
respect to both ability and price, and the sale was quickly concluded.
I noted an entire absence of any disposition to take an undue
advantage. Mr. Easton then told me that they were troubled with lack
of power every afternoon when the foundry blower was on, and had
long wanted to drive this blower independently. It needed to make
2025 revolutions per minute to give the blast they required, and they
had planned to drive it by a frictional gearing, nine to one, if my
engine could run at the necessary speed. So this most peculiar and
exceptional opportunity for its application, absolutely the only chance
for its sale that had appeared, and that at the very last moment,
prevented my returning home in disappointment. It is hardly
necessary to add that the engine proved completely successful. I
shall refer to it again.
The point of the incident is this: It established the fact, the
statement of which otherwise no one from the result would credit for
an instant, that, from the afternoon when the black and averted looks
of my loom exhibitors were changed to smiling congratulations down
to the close of the exhibition, the engine never once had a warm
bearing or was interrupted for a single moment. It was visited by
every engineer in England, and by a multitude of engine users, was
admired by every one, and won the entire confidence of all
observers in its speed, its regulation, and the perfection of its
diagrams; and yet in all that six months not a builder ever said a
word about building it, nor a user said a word about using it; and, as
week after week and month after month passed without a sign, I
became almost stupefied with astonishment and distress.
The explanation of this phenomenon was entirely simple, but I did
not know it, and there was no one to even hint it to me. I was among
a people whose fundamental ideas respecting steam-engines were
entirely different from those to which I had been accustomed, and I
knew nothing about them, and so could not address myself to them.
In the view of every Englishman a non-condensing engine was
rubbish. Those which were made were small, cheap affairs, mostly
for export. Neither a builder nor a user could regard a non-
condensing engine with the slightest interest.
Now I do not think that in my limited sphere of observation at
home I had ever seen a condensing stationary engine, except the
engine which pumped out the dry-dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In
my mind condensing engines were associated with ships and
steamboats. At this exhibition also there were shown only non-
condensing engines. I did not think of the reason for this, that in this
part of London, far away from the Thames, no water could be had for
condensing purposes. I took it all as a matter of course, though I was
astonished at the queer lot of engines in the company of which I
found myself.
I was, of course, familiar with the development of the stationary
engine in England from the original type, in which the pressure of
steam below that of the atmosphere, and sometimes the pressure of
the atmosphere itself furnished the larger proportion of the power
exerted; but after all I carried with me my American ideas, which
were limited to non-condensing engines, and had no conception of
the gulf that separated my thoughts from those of the men about me.
My visitors always wound up with the same question, “How do you
drive your air-pump?” And in my innocence I uniformly replied, “The
engine is a non-condensing engine; it has no air-pump”; all
unconscious that every time I said that I was consigning the engine
to the rubbish heap. This reply was taken necessarily as a frank
admission that the high-speed engine was not adapted for
condensing. Of course, then, it had no interest for them. No doubt
many wondered why I should have troubled myself to show it there
at all. If I had thought more deeply I must have been struck by the
unvarying form of this question, always assuming the air-pump to be
a part of the engine, but which, of course, could not be used there,
and only inquiring how I worked it; and also by the fact that after
getting my answer the questioner soon departed, and I scarcely ever
saw the same visitor again. But I did not think deeply. Perhaps the
conditions of excitement were not favorable to reflection. All I thought
was that this same everlasting question, which at home I would
never have heard, was getting awfully monotonous. After a while this
annoying question came to be asked less and less frequently, and
also the engine attracted less and less attention. The engine had
failed in a vital respect, and I did not know it. That the fact of the
engine being non-condensing should have been an objection to it
never once entered my mind.
But I doubt if I could have bettered the matter, however alive to
this difficulty I might have been. I showed all I had yet accomplished.
In the minds of my visitors it no doubt appeared impossible to run an
air-pump successfully at such a speed; the water and air would be
churned into foam, and the valves would not close in time. This
objection I was not prepared to meet, for I had not thought on the
subject at all. Moreover, it could not have been met in any way
except by a practical demonstration. For that demonstration I had yet
to wait five years.
There were many things connected with this season which were
well worth remembering. One of these was the visit of the jury. It was
the only time I ever met Professor Rankine. There were two or three
Frenchmen on the jury, and they engaged in an animated discussion
of the question whether the steam could follow the piston at so great
a speed. I well remember the sharp exclamation with which
Professor Rankine put an end to this nonsense, when he had got
tired of it. “There is no limit to the speed at which steam will follow a
piston.”
One day I had a call from Mr. John Penn, Mr. William Fairbairn,
and Mr. Robert Napier, who came together on a visit of ceremony,
and presented me their cards. In return I presented to them the
cards of the engine. But their visit, like most others, closed with the
same inevitable question.
It was a delightful hour that Mr. F. W. Webb spent with me. He was
then assistant engineer of the London & Northwestern Railway under
Mr. Ramsbottom, afterwards Mr. Ramsbottom’s successor, and the
pioneer builder of compound-cylinder locomotives. He told me about
the new form of traveling-crane invented by Mr. Ramsbottom for the
shops at Crewe, which was driven by a flying-rope, a ³⁄₄-inch cotton
cord, and also of other inventions of Mr. Ramsbottom—among these
the automatic cylinder lubricator, in which the condensation of the
steam was so rapid, from the locomotive rushing through the
atmosphere, that only the water formed on the conical end of a bolt
was permitted to drop into the oil, other condensation running into a
circular trough and back through an external gooseneck pipe to the
steam-chest; and of their experiments to observe the rate of this
condensation. For this purpose they used soda-water bottles, which
they found capable of resisting a pressure of 200 pounds on the
square inch, and in which they could see the rapidity with which the
condensed water displaced the oil, thus leading to the above device
for limiting this action; also about the Ramsbottom piston rings,
which came to be, and still are, so largely used. These consist, as is
well known, of square wrought-iron rods, say ¹⁄₂ inch square, two for
each piston, sprung into grooves. What is not so generally known is
the way in which these rings were originated, which Mr. Webb then
described to me. As sold, these are not circular rings, but when
compressed in the cylinder they become truly circular and exert the
same pressure at every point. The original form was found for each
size in this way: A circular iron table was prepared, provided with a
large number of pulleys located radially and equidistant around its
edge. A ring having the section of the proposed rings, turned to the
size of the cylinder, and cut on one side, was laid on this table, and
cords were attached to it at equal distances passing over these
pulleys. Equal weights were hung on these cords, sufficient to
expand this ring to the extent desired. The form of the expanded ring
was then marked on the table, and to the lines thus obtained the
rings were then rolled. He told me also of the trough and scoop
invented by Mr. Ramsbottom, and now used the world over, for
refilling locomotive tanks while running at full speed. Being a
locomotive man, Mr. Webb did not ask about the way I drove my air-
pump.
Mr. Clark formed a scheme to indicate all the engines in the
exhibition, twenty-four in number, all English except mine, so far as I
remember, and employed my indicator for the purpose, the diagrams
being taken by myself. Only two exhibitors declined to have their
engines indicated. As I afterwards learned, most of the engines were
bought for use there, as exhibitors would not exhibit non-condensing
engines.
One of those who refused permission were Gwynne & Co., the
principal partner a nephew of my centrifugal-force friend of earlier
days. They exhibited a centrifugal pump supplying a waterfall. They
employed Mr. Zerah Colburn, then editor of The Engineer, to
investigate their pair of non-condensing engines and find out why
they used so much steam. He borrowed my indicator to make a
private test. Of course, I never saw the diagrams, but Mr. Colburn
informed me that by making some changes he had reduced the back
pressure to 7 pounds above the atmosphere, which he claimed to be
as good as could be expected. No material improvement in the
engines was to be observed, however.
Some of the diagrams taken on these tests exhibited almost
incredible faults. The only really good ones were from a pair of
engines made by Easton, Amos & Sons, also to drive a large
centrifugal pump, built for drainage purposes in Demerara, and
sustaining another waterfall. These showed the steam cut off sharply
at one third of the stroke by separately driven valves on the back of
the main slides. A mortifying feature of this work for myself was that
on testing the indicator Mr. Clark found that the area of the piston,
which was represented to be one quarter of a square inch, was really
considerably less than this, showing lamentable inaccuracy on the
part of the makers, as well as my own neglect to discover it. This
rendered the instrument valueless for measuring power, but it
showed the character of the diagrams all right.
The finest mechanical drawing I ever saw—or any one else, I think
—was shown in this exhibition. It was a drawing of the steamship
“Persia,” then the pride of the Cunard fleet, and was the only
mechanical drawing ever admitted to the walls of the National
Gallery, where it had appeared the year before. It represented side
and end elevations and plan, as well as longitudinal and cross-
sections, was painted and shaded in water-colors, and involved an
almost incredible amount of work. It was made by Mr. Kirkaldy, then
a draftsman in the employ of the Napiers, of Glasgow, the builders of
the vessel. I am tempted to refer to this, as it forms a prominent
datum point from which to measure the development of steam
navigation in the brief space of forty years. The vessel did not
possess a single feature, large or small, that now exists. It was of
only about 3000 tons burden. It was an iron ship built in the days of
the rapid transition from wood to steel. It was propelled by paddle-
wheels. These were driven by a pair of side-lever engines. The
engines had each a single cylinder. The steam pressure carried was
nominally 25 pounds above the atmosphere, but practically only from
15 to 20 pounds. Full pressure was not pretended to be maintained.
They had jet condensers. All forged work was of iron. The vessel
was steered by hand. The rigging, standing as well as running, was
of hemp. It was full bark-rigged.
Frederick E. Sickels