The New York Yankees as an American Cultural Icon, 1940-1970

Abstract

The New York Yankees baseball club, arguably the United States' most successful and well-known sports franchise, have acquired many cultural connotations over the years, meanings transcending the immediate world of on-field sporting contest. This study argues that by the 1940s, the Yankee's success in the previous decades and their representation in popular culture caused a coherent set of cultural meanings to crystallize around the club to create an American icon. This icon served as an emblem for a set of interrelated mid-century mainstream American values, namely the American dream of upward mobility, heroic masculinity, and a narrative of national success. The meanings, perspectives on, and uses of this mid-century Yankees cultural icon have not been homogenous, but have shifted generally with the team's on-field performance and broader historic changes, as well as with the perspectives of individual cultural producers and audiences. In particular, increasingly throughout the 1950s and `60s, a general shift towards a negative perspective on the Yankees icon emerged in cultural texts of the era, one that increasingly saw the American values they embodied in a negative light. In these texts, representations of the Yankees as elitist, greedy, racist, too-tradition-bound, and overly-corporate are utilized to convey a critique of these values. This general shift in perceptions and uses of the Yankees icon parallels and is part of the broader cultural conflict and shift occurring between World War II and the end of the 1960s. Methodologically, this study draws on Roland Barthes application of semiotic theory to cultural communication in a broader sense. It draws on baseball history and general cultural history and seeks historical readings of texts from literature, film, popular music, journalism, and sports fan culture. In particular, The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Joe DiMaggio's autobiography Lucky to Be a Yankee (1947), Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Mark Harris's The Southpaw (1953), Douglass Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954), Damn Yankees (1955 Broadway, '58 film), Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" (1968) and Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) are analyzed for the way they represent and use the Yankees.