Kindle Notes & Highlights
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February 21 - April 2, 2023
“My impression is that father didn’t play a great game, but played very hard.”
“The Tennis Cabinet is supposed to be that coterie which plays tennis with the President and between plays gives him points on people and things. If some of them could see how little talking there was at these alleged tennis cabinet meetings.”
Serious men, doing serious things, could include exercise and athletics as an important part of their days.
So in Roosevelt’s world, Ethel could play, sure, but usually after Ted, Kermit, Archie, and even Quentin had their chance first. And not until the Tennis Cabinet had cleared the court. This despite the fact that by the time Ethel turned sixteen she could bring all the game to the court that any Roosevelt could handle. Perhaps she was even the best in the family. “She can beat all four of her brothers at tennis,” the Chicago Tribune reported, matter of factly.
I
do not mean to say that a very bright fellow can play football well, or that a tolerably dull fellow cannot; but if you find a boy who is too shiftless to work at his books he will also be too shiftless to work at sports in the long run. —Theodore Roosevelt
My mantra for students who claim they'll care when they're paid.
Urban life was depriving children of the physical rites of passage that their ancestors had taken for granted.
Physical education classes became popular in schools beginning in the 1880s. Tournaments and competitions involving high school aged athletes proliferated during the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Roosevelt loomed as the biggest prize for the PSAL. Would the sitting president of the United States give official sanction to the PSAL? The courting began almost immediately. Jacob Riis, the New York City reformer and a personal friend of the president, took on the task of facilitating the formal “ask” for support. Riis sent off an appeal letter from Wingate, enclosed with a letter of his own.
“Judicious athletic sports are particularly needed by city boys,” read the opening lines in the inaugural PSAL Official Handbook. “Because of the work, which in all previous years of the world’s history has been available as a source of muscular education of boys, is now done very largely by machinery.”
“Muscular Christianity,” a doctrine that emphasized saving America—especially American men and boys—from the enervating effects of city life through a “Christian commitment to health and manliness,”
A belief that has done untold damage.
Never before had the public education system been so intricately involved in creating nonacademic change in American children.
The exercises were a bit different, but the intent to measure/encourage/embarrass children into fitness was roughly similar.
We spoke of the relation of good bodies to good morals, we thought of the relation of bodily training to mental training.”
But like Gulick, this suitor suffered from “migraine headaches” and a “highly organized” nervous system. Could love trump such physical flaws? Not for Gulick. Thus the two lovestruck teenagers wrenched themselves apart, determined not to have a sterile marriage or “to be responsible for further accentuation of their undesirable traits to their offspring.”
Son of a bitch.
It was Gulick’s tendency to force together topics that many of his contemporaries thought had little in common and then move on to an altogether different project that left James Naismith as sole inventor of the game of basketball—at least in the eyes of most historians.
European students, Gulick reported to the board of education, “carry their books home in a modified form of knapsack carried upon the back.” Thus began the backpack’s rise to ubiquity in American schools.
“While the beginning of our work in the league will be with boys, the girls will not be neglected. It is certainly just as essential that they be strong and robust, too, but our efforts on their behalf will come later on.” It was as if the nation’s leaders sensed that all children needed a different, more physically vigorous, upbringing, but they could not conceive of treating boys and girls equally. The boys were the real crisis.
Bizarre as it seems to us, to “act Presidential” in 1904 meant a president did not actually campaign for reelection to the office held. The dirty work of making the case for the candidate was to be done by friends and political partners.
McKinley was no puppet; he set the message and the overall campaign strategy. But he let Hanna serve as his major general, moving campaign troops and resources as needed. McKinley won the presidency in 1896 and then again in 1900.
“Most men, on coming to box for the first time with a champion, present or retired, show some trepidation,” Donovan explained. “There was none of that here.” The men fought; Roosevelt refused to be handled with extra care. He objected to soft blows by Donovan.
In the end though, it was sorted out. The Olympic Committee awarded Hicks the marathon trophy. Sullivan’s Amateur Athletic Union (AAU)—a regulatory body especially important in track and field—banned Lorz from future competition for perpetrating an athletic fraud.
When considering gold, silver, and bronze medals, American athletes went home with 85 percent of the available hardware. Future American Olympic teams would never have it so good.
Roosevelt’s version of proper boyhood included physicality, moral character, and education. He approved of some measure of troublemaking and violence, as long as it was in the interest of adventure.
Ted also joined the football team. And through football, Ted found a way to diverge from his father’s path—to earn his father’s respect and admiration.
Roosevelt had mixed emotions on football; yes, he respected the game and admired its rugged qualities, but he struggled with what to do about its damaging side effects.
“I am proud of your pluck, and I greatly admire football…but the very things that make it a good game make it a rough game.”
During the 1905 season, eighteen high school and college players died due to injuries they sustained on the gridiron. Another eighty-eight college players suffered serious injury.
Football pushed universities to focus on outside constituencies (fans and boosters) rather than its own students. Eliot certainly had no patience for the unquantifiable idea that football somehow turned physical toil into moral improvements. He saw the opposite occurring; why wouldn’t a football player who undercut his opponent on the field act similarly in other situations? And then of course, there was the violence.
Valid points.
“Football is on trial,” Roosevelt began. “Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it. And so I have called you all down here to see whether you won’t agree to abide by both the letter and the spirit of the rules, for that will help.”
This was strange to Reid; he remembered an incident in a Yale–Princeton game where Princeton had savagely targeted one of Yale’s All-American De Seaulles brothers (either Charles or John) because he had an injured ankle.
This would continue to the present day!
It’s possible the men could have done less, but it’s difficult to conclude how. The statement contained no real concessions, no specific policy changes, and no admission that football had any structural problems at all.
Snarky.
After all,” Reid concluded, “the way which the game is played depends largely on the way in which the coaches take hold and the way in which the officials rule, and I think a good stiff official would do more in regard to this matter than anything else.”
Excellent point.
November 7: “We should be overjoyed to see you, but I don’t want you to leave if it is going to interfere with your football; still more with your studies…As I say, don’t come if it will interfere with either the football or the studies. You must not lose the chance of getting into the Yale game, even if it is only a small chance…”
“Good for you!” TR wrote to Ted on November 19, the day after the Harvard freshmen lost to Yale, 0–16. “Of course I am sorry that Yale beat us, but I am very glad that you made the team and I am not merely glad but very proud that you should have played as you evidently did play in the game.” There was no holding back here. Roosevelt swelled with affection for his namesake, who had accomplished something that TR had always wanted for himself.
Young Roosevelt Has All His Father’s Grit. Young Roosevelt: Gridiron Hero.
Walking will cure all.
Wow, this exercise cures all schtick is older than I thought.
From the hospital, Roosevelt, alone save for his protection, walked to Grace Reformed Church on Fifteenth Street, near Rhode Island Avenue, where he attended the weekly service. The spired, stain-glassed, “very churchly” church was TR’s worship home for all of his presidency. He attended regularly. If he had to miss, he sent Rev. John Schick a note by courier an hour before service time explaining his absence.
The point-to-point walk seems endearing when thinking of a father with his children; it sounds bizarre when it involves the president of the United States and unsuspecting diplomats.
Upon arriving in Washington, DC, Jusserand had feared that his own relationship with TR might never equal that of the well-established ambassadors of Britain or Germany. Fortunately for Jusserand, Britain’s man could not keep up with Roosevelt. Britain’s ambassador, Mortimer Durand, fell apart in his one attempt to walk with Roosevelt.
Weston shared Roosevelt’s belief (and that evidenced by groups like the PSAL) that athletics were for the masses—for every man, woman, and child, regardless of whether they had the skill to throw a ball or a predisposition toward competition. All Americans, according to Weston, needed to exercise. In a lengthy interview given in Buffalo during his 1907 trek, Weston proffered all sorts of advice.
Father and all of us regarded baseball as a mollycoddle game. Tennis, football, lacrosse, boxing, polo, yes—they are violent, which appealed to us. But baseball? Father wouldn’t watch it, not even at Harvard. —Alice Roosevelt Longworth
“Wellington said that ‘the battle of Waterloo was won on the cricket fields of England,’ and President Roosevelt is credited with a somewhat similar statement that ‘the battle of San Juan Hill was won on the base ball and foot ball fields of America.’”
Even the stuffy Supreme Court got it. Chief Justice Harlan, of the Nation’s Highest Court, Plays Base Ball and makes a Home Run in His 74th Year, trumpeted one headline. “Far from distracting from the dignity of the distinguished incumbent of the Supreme Court seat, the ability of Harlan as a hitter will add to it. That home run is a human touch, a specimen of Americanism that will go far toward popularizing the venerable judge.”
"Harlan was a badass, man. He didn't stay in his lane."
The mollycoddle threat always loomed for Roosevelt. “As I emphatically disbelieve in seeing Harvard or any other college turn out mollycoddles instead of vigorous men,” Roosevelt said at a Harvard speech in 1907, “I may add that I do not in the least object to a sport because it is rough.”
In order to control labor costs, baseball owners put in place the simple but devilishly effective “reserve clause” in 1869. This anti-competition, anti-capitalist measure allowed each baseball club to “reserve” or control five players each year.
The two rival leagues had only recently come to a monopolistic agreement to stop poaching players away from each other, a timely development given that Roosevelt had established the US Department of Commerce at about the same time to facilitate such business enjoinders.
What’s so strange about Roosevelt’s cold war on baseball is just how lonely it was. Roosevelt acted almost as a solitary critic. The antibaseball island Roosevelt ruled had just a few cranky inhabitants. Inhabitants, ironically, like Charles Eliot, who opposed the game in a manner which seemed entirely out of touch with competitive sports. “I understand that a curveball is thrown with a deliberate attempt to deceive,” Eliot had said. “Surely this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard.”
Albert Spalding led baseball’s inquisition. By the turn of the century, Spalding could no longer stomach one of the working theories—the idea that baseball descended from the European game Rounders. This simply could not be. Spalding, and America, had too much at stake.
In short, Doubleday fit within the paradigm of the Strenuous Life.
