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February 21 - April 2, 2023
The president then would attend to political matters—trust-busting, empire building, Progressive reforms, or whatever—while his partners waited. Decisions rendered, play resumed.
Why does the United States, unlike most civilized countries, comingle education and athletics? What’s the deal with the Army–Navy football game? Has the United States always dominated the Olympic Games medal count? Is baseball (or football or basketball—it’s obviously not soccer or hockey) really America’s “national pastime?”
During the time Theodore Roosevelt occupied the White House, modern sports emerged in America.
In baseball, the American and National Leagues worked out a monopolistic merger. Begrudgingly (and somewhat surprisingly), the rival circuits agreed to stop poaching players from each other. Out of this agreement came the first World Series in 1903.
Roosevelt deserves a lion’s share of the credit, or blame (depending on one’s opinion of sports in America), for the rise of modern sports. Sure, Progressive reforms, Social Darwinist fears, and an international muscular Christianity movement, among other factors, fueled this sports revolution. Changes had been decades in the making. And strangely, Roosevelt did not even like baseball. But Roosevelt occupied the presidency of the United States during this critical era.
Basically, Americans seemed to have every sign of economic progress and technological development in their midst, but
Seems familiar.
instead of flourishing they were falling apart.
It was a “Survival of the Fittest” world. In what place would the United States settle as a new century dawned? Sports—with their physicality and competitive framework—applied because they could be lumped into efforts to create a stronger, healthier citizenry.
Roosevelt’s boxing in the White House, for example, is butted up against the rise of the NCAA. The fact that these two happenings share a similar chronological anchor point does not necessarily mean that there is a causal relationship between the two phenomena. But there might be. We’ll see. The
hope is that the weaving together of these two narrative threads (Roosevelt’s athletic biography and America’s sport revolution) will yield a rich understanding of how sports in America came to develop as they did.
In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard: don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard. —Theodore Roosevelt
Agreed!
Roosevelt was a football parent, a football evangelist, and a football fan all at the same time; he did not plan to miss any of this Army–Navy contest.
“For the first time in the history of American athletics,” the Baltimore Sun reported, “the White House was deserted because of a football game.” McKinley had never made such a vigorous outing. He preferred to spend his leisure time sitting in a rocker, smoking cigars, playing cards.
Roosevelt’s energy was palpable. Here was the man who would set a Guinness Record for shaking hands with 8,150 people in one day. Roosevelt regularly drank a gallon of coffee a day, using a coffee cup that was, according to his son Ted, “more in the nature of a bathtub.”
TR cheered both sides, favoring the rough tackle and hard hit above all else. Roosevelt was a boxer, after all. Physical contact satiated the president. Roosevelt unleashed a steady torrent of analysis and appreciation to those within earshot. He used all the football jargon of the day, plus some of his own making.
She tried a few times to get her husband, the president of the United States after all, to keep it down. But she didn’t try too hard; there was no quieting TR in such a space as this.
So what did they do? Placing a premium on field position, Army punted. Again, on first down.
Weird.
Tailgating, the Rose Bowl, the College Football Playoffs, Joe Paterno, the Heisman Trophy, cheerleaders, and Nick Saban—the starting point was here.
But one interesting theory is that football became more regimented and controllable at this time because of the changes in America’s business culture happening at the same time. Efficiency expert Frederick Taylor’s “Scientific Management” ruled the 1890s and emphasized that through training and optimal movements businesses could maximize their profits. With football’s start and stop rules in place, a football coach could employ similar strategies on the field.
More than the violence, or the field, or the ball, or the number of players, it’s football’s stop and start orchestration that most distinctly sets it apart. When “mass momentum” plays—like the “flying wedge” which involved players getting a running start before the snap of the ball and then crushing a predestined target across the line after the play started—resulted in rising injuries tolls, the answer was even further control of the line of scrimmage.
Controlled violence.
Second, Americans tend to believe, even if they don’t outright say so, that football prepares men for military combat, or at the very least for robust citizenship. Men weren’t men at the dawn of the twentieth century, not compared to previous generations.
Making sense of Roosevelt the sideline hugger, and the reaction of the crowd to their new president, deserves some pause. On the one hand, these were just fans doing things that fans typically do at football games. And Roosevelt was simply acting with characteristic enthusiasm and gusto. But the coming together of young and virile Roosevelt, with the football squads made up of future sailors and soldiers, and the citizens of a nation still considering what it meant to lose another president to an assassination, made for a unique moment.
But it seems to me that if we would let Colonel Ernst and Captain Cooper come to an agreement that the match should be played just as either eleven plays outside teams, that no cadet should be permitted to enter or join the training table if he was unsatisfactory in any study or conduct and should be removed if during the season he becomes unsatisfactory, if they were marked without regard to their places on the team, if no drills, exercises or recitations were omitted to give opportunities for football practice, and if the authorities of both institutions agreed to take measure to prevent any
...more
First, he wanted men— “tall, and sinewy, with resolute, weather-beaten faces”—from America’s southwest territories. And second, Roosevelt wanted college athletes.
But the game was a start. Football was a start. Sports were a start. Right?
“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.”
“A healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives, when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them…”
“When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood…they are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong and brave and high-minded.”
Ok then....
The resources at the family’s disposal were significant. Unlike his political hero Abraham Lincoln, Roosevelt could make no up-by-the-bootstraps claims. The Roosevelts were New York City rich.
The condition terrorized and embarrassed Roosevelt. Part of the shame came from the fact that during the nineteenth century, asthma was understood as a nervous, neurotic affliction. Henry
Pay a membership fee to work up a sweat—this idea seems perfectly normal to most Americans now. After all, today Americans spend more than $24 billion annually on fitness memberships.
Theodore Roosevelt assumed that a very strong, nearly exact causal relationship existed between his athletic activity and his rise to mostly normal health. Wouldn’t we all? The relationship seemed obviously intertwined. A little exercise begot a little progress. Then as Roosevelt neared college age and increased his athletic training to a near maniacal level, the asthma, right on cue, decreased more rapidly too.
The gym work was at least partly a coincidence. This pattern of aging out of asthma is well documented and acknowledged today; in the nineteenth century though there was no such understanding.
You can't always will yourself out of health issues.
“The worst lesson that can be taught to a man,” Roosevelt would declare, “is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings.” Fix your own problems. Strengthen your own weaknesses. TR had exercised his asthma off. To be clear, there was nothing fraudulent in Roosevelt’s claim. But the result of Roosevelt’s conviction would play out over the coming decades. For if Roosevelt could do it—empower himself through exercise and sports and the Strenuous Life—the rest of the nation could be compelled to do the same.
Roosevelt argued that the optimal manner by which to push Harvard athletes toward excellence was to give them a singular opportunity: the opportunity to defeat their Yale counterparts.
Roosevelt enjoyed the multicourse meals and ready-made camaraderie. He craved fine things and formality. It would be the Porcellian Club that would summon Roosevelt back to Harvard thirty years later to make a speech on athletics in America.
But then there were the glasses. TR wore glasses because he suffered from grossly nearsighted vision. So even though Roosevelt desperately wanted to look rough and manly, he entered the gymnasium with a “delicate appearance” and “a pair of big spectacles lashed to his head.”
In January 1880, Alice accepted Roosevelt’s marriage proposal, although not without some concern, historian Kathleen Dalton notes, “about losing all her freedom by marrying the intense jealous man she called ‘Teddy.’” The couple would wed in the coming fall, just after Roosevelt obtained his degree from Harvard University.
It was as if Harvard had realized that it had to create some athletic space, but it wasn’t going to advertise the true purpose of its newest building.
Dudley Sargent was driven by a fundamental concern that America was becoming too weak to compete in a challenging world. Men were sitting too much of the day. Children did not spend enough time outside. Women remained confined to domestic duties inside their homes. Softer work was making for a softer nation.
Always a complaint in the US--not as many complain about growing stupidity or lack of emotions.
In the decades following his time at Harvard, Roosevelt would consistently downplay the utility of his college degree. It had been a positive experience, but it was hardly applicable, or even relevant, to the work that he went on to do. “I
thoroughly enjoyed Harvard,” Roosevelt summarized years later, “and I am sure it did me good, but only in the general effect, for there was very little in my actual studies which helped me in afterlife.”
The passion caught TR by surprise. Roosevelt tried to explain his predicament to his sister Anna. He wanted Edith but felt trapped by his own moralism. “I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages,” he wrote. “I have always considered that they argued weakness in a man’s character…But please I do very earnestly ask you not to visit my sins upon poor little Edith.”
It did not look like much, but this tennis court at the White House became a tangible manifestation of the Strenuous Life presidency.
Roosevelt did not worry about his guests’ comfort. The court had no chairs or benches. Just a court. Just tennis.
For Ethel, who turned ten just before the Roosevelts moved to the White House, tennis offered the best opportunity to compete alongside her brothers. Football, baseball, boxing, wrestling—these were off limits to young girls.
“Is the President Extravagant?” No. “It is true that there is a tennis-court on the White House grounds, but it cost less than four hundred dollars—which is a much smaller amount than was expended upon the greenhouses under the previous administrations.”
To Roosevelt the game was meant for exhaustion and competition. He cared little about decorum. His partners ranged from children, to diplomats, to soldiers.
While the working definition of “athlete” was always a moving target, a Roosevelt archetype had emerged by his second full year in office. Secretary of the Navy Victor Metcalf was a former Yale crewman, baseball, and football player. Postmaster General George Cortelyou and Attorney General William Moody were former baseball players as well. Secretary of War William H. Taft, “notwithstanding his 250 pounds,” rode horses, boxed, and—above all else—golfed. Secretary of the Treasury
Leslie Shaw was a horseman.
