650 Chapter 24 Postwar Society and Culture: Change and Adjustment
Newly built Yankee Stadium on opening day of the 1923 baseball season. Babe Ruth hit his first home run and
soon Yankee Stadium was dubbed “the House that Ruth Built.” That year, perhaps his best, Ruth hit forty-one
home runs, batted .393, and drew 170 walks. He got on base more than half the times he appeared at the plate.
Ruth’s feats matched the colossal appearance of Yankee Stadium, whose arches evoked the imperial grandeur
of ancient Rome.who won both the pentathlon and the decathlon at
the 1912 Olympic Games, made Walter Camp’s All-
American football team in 1912 and 1913, then
played major league baseball for several years before
becoming a pioneer founder and player in the
National Football League. But what truly made the
1920s a golden age was a coincidence—the emer-
gence in a few short years of a remarkable collection
of what today would be called superstars.
In football there was the University of Illinois’s
Harold “Red” Grange, who averaged over ten yards a
carry during his college career and who in one incredi-
ble quarter during the 1924 game between Illinois and
Michigan carried the ball four times and scored a
touchdown each time, gaining in the process 263 yards.
In prize fighting, heavyweight champion Jack
Dempsey, the “Manassas Mauler,” knocked out a suc-
cession of challengers in bloody battles only to be
deposed in 1927 by “Gentleman Gene” Tunney, who
gave him a fifteen-round boxing lesson and then,
according to Tunney’s own account, celebrated by con-
suming “several pots of tea.”
During the same years William “Big Bill” Tilden
dominated tennis, winning the national singles title
every year from 1920 to 1925 along with nearly
every other tournament he entered. Beginning in
1923, Robert T. “Bobby” Jones ruled over the world
of golf with equal authority, his climactic achieve-
ment being his capture of the amateur and open
championships of both the United States and Great
Britain in 1930.
A few women athletes dominated their sports
during this golden age in similar fashion. In tennis
Helen Wills was three times United States singles
champion and the winner of the women’s singles at
Wimbledon eight times in the late 1920s and early
1930s. The swimmer Gertrude Ederle, holder of
eighteen world records by the time she was seven-
teen, swam the English Channel on her second
attempt, in 1926. She was not only the first woman to
do so, but she did it faster than any of the four men
who had previously made it across.
However, the sports star among stars was “the
Sultan of Swat,” baseball’s Babe Ruth.^1 Ruth not
only dominated baseball, he changed it from a game
ruled by pitchers and low scores to one in which hit-
ting was more greatly admired. Originally himself a
brilliant pitcher, his incredible hitting ability made
him more valuable in the outfield, where he could
play every day. Before Ruth, John “Home Run”
Baker was the most famous slugger; his greatest
annual home run total was 12, achieved shortly
before the Great War. Ruth hit twenty-nine in 1919
and fifty-four in 1920, his first year with the New
York Yankees. By 1923 he was so feared that pitchers
intentionally walked him more than half the times he
appeared at the plate.(^1) His full name was George Herman Ruth, but the nickname, Babe,
given to him early in his career, was what everyone called him.