MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Scholars remember Frank Merriwell and Tip Top Weekly (1896-1912) as the fictional adolescent and dime novel that established the schoolboy sports story in juvenile literature. What often goes overlooked is that Merriwell was also, for a brief period early in the title’s run, a world traveler whose voyages took him through the American South and Southwest, Latin America and Africa, Western Europe, and the South Pacific and Asia. Along the way he created a hierarchy of the world’s peoples in relation to Americans. As a cultural imperialist, Merriwell’s experiences “broadened” his understanding of what it meant to belong to a progressive society where—ideally—the right sorts of men meted out opportunity according to their merit. Yet, with very few exceptions, Tip Top’s sixteen-year-long storyline concentrated on his athletic exploits. This amnesia regarding Merriwell’s commentary on world affairs stemmed from how the title’s publisher, Street and Smith, and its author, Gilbert Patten, and its readers worked with and against each other to determine what exactly constituted a story about schoolboy sports adventures. Juvenile readers were willing participants in this endeavor; they both shaped and were shaped by the Merriwell saga. In the process, they helped create the fiction of the “all-American” boy and defined his existence as decidedly insular in relation to the rest of the world. Even though the reality was that Tip Top’s readers were a diverse lot—and included international readers—Merriwell’s jingoism helped make the story into one for middle-class American boys. Overseas travel did not become a regular part of the storyline because his experiences abroad taught him that he would learn more about manhood playing sports at school in America than by associating with less-than-manly types abroad. Manly boyhood was a domestic game; imperialism was work for adults.