SWANSON: “I WAS NEVER A CHAMPION AT ANYTHING”
“I Never Was a Champion at
Anything”: Theodore
Roosevelt’s Complex and
Contradictory Record as
America’s “Sports President”
RYAN A. SWANSON†
History and Art History Department
George Mason University
The historical memory of Theodore Roosevelt as an athlete and as a builder of
America’s modern sporting landscape is an enduring one. Scholars and lay
historians alike have often recounted Roosevelt’s athletic feats. And indeed many
connections do exist. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)
links Roosevelt to its earliest days. Fans of the Army-Navy football game tout
Roosevelt as a forefather. Journalists covering Roosevelt’s time in the White House
have left behind dozens of stories describing the president’s wrestling, hiking,
sparring, and tennis matches. Despite these connections (and others), however,
the broadly accepted historical memory is imprecise—at times exaggerating
Roosevelt’s impact on the sporting world and at other times failing to appreciate
the complexity and contradictions inherent in Roosevelt’s “athletic doctrine.”
This article begins to remedy that imprecision by examining the historiography
and historical memory of Roosevelt the athlete and identifying the tenets of
†
Correspondence to [email protected]. The author would like to thank the anonymous referees
for their outstanding critiques.
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Roosevelt’s athletic doctrine. Then, and most significantly, the study examines
several examples of Roosevelt’s limited influence over the development of modern
sporting culture in the United States. The goal of the study is not to knock
Roosevelt from his pedestal within U.S. sports history but rather to reconsider
the intricacies of Roosevelt’s athletic biography and to recalibrate our understanding of Roosevelt’s influence over sporting culture.
S
HORTLY AFTER PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA MOVED into the White House in 2009,
as journalists struggled to find innovative reporting angles from which to satisfy the American
public’s fascination with their new president, the Wall Street Journal published an article
considering Obama as the “Sports President.” The article noted that Obama, among
other sports-related activities, played pick-up basketball, advocated for a college football
playoff, golfed, participated in the annual rite of filling out a bracket for the National
Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament, and often wore the sporting apparel of his Chicago sports teams. This—by some loose standard—went beyond
the athletic résumés of most presidents. Except for one. Try as he might, the Wall Street
Journal concluded, the most that would likely be said of President Obama was that by the
end of his tenure he might possess “the most expansive sports résumé for any president
since Theodore Roosevelt.”1
When it comes to United States presidents and athletics, Theodore Roosevelt dominates his competition. “To be sure,” John S. Watterson, an expert on the U.S. Presidency
and athletics, has asserted, “Theodore Roosevelt’s high energy approach to his sporting
interests and to his politics has not yet been matched by any other president in its scope
and intensity.”2 Roosevelt is remembered as an advocate of “strenuous living.”3 He has
been called “the father of the annual Army-Navy football game,” “America’s greatest hunter,”
and a “holy terror with eye glasses.” The NCAA named its highest award after Roosevelt.4
Other presidents, of course, have taken part in athletics as well—several with greater skill
than Roosevelt ever demonstrated. Most notably, Gerald Ford was a two-way starter and
two-time national champion on the University of Michigan’s football team. George H.W.
Bush ably manned first base for Yale and played in the first College World Series.5
This article is not intended to break new ground on the questions of who played what
or how well they played. Nor is this a pure presidential study. Since Roosevelt, as warhero, governor of New York, vice president, president, and then as a very prominent former
president, enjoyed more than twenty years in the national spotlight, the study will consider Roosevelt’s many athletic credentials during that extended period. This paper is not
an attempt to topple Roosevelt from his rightful pedestal in U.S. sports history. Rather
the methodology of this study involves analyzing the historiography and historical memory
concerning Theodore Roosevelt as an athlete, then considering Roosevelt’s ideas about the
role of athletics in society (his athletic doctrine), and finally analyzing the complex relationship between Roosevelt’s much-extolled ideas on sport and America’s sporting trends
at the beginning of the twentieth century.
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Historians have had plenty to say about Roosevelt over the past one hundred years.
When it comes to athletics, most scholars have coalesced around the idea that “Theodore
Roosevelt occupies a crucial place in the invention of the sporting republic.”6 The spadework still to be done on the topic of Roosevelt as The Sports President, however, involves
more clearly understanding Roosevelt’s ideas on sport and analyzing how those ideas affected American culture. A simple perusal of early twentieth century newspapers reveals
that the nation praised Roosevelt for his vitality and athleticism. But that same nation,
broadly speaking, also ignored many of Roosevelt’s specific suggestions about “proper”
and “useful” athletic activity. This reality on its own should not surprise us. Presidents do
not dictate many things, let alone cultural trends.7 So what then should it mean to refer to
Roosevelt as the Sports President?8 This article addresses that question and the entwined
historical paradox, making sense of an American populace that lauded Roosevelt’s example but sidestepped many tenets of his sports guidance.
The historiography of Theodore Roosevelt is extensive and diverse. When analyzing
Roosevelt’s role in athletics and in shaping athletic culture, one must draw upon the works
of sports historians, political historians, and presidential biographers. In connecting
Roosevelt to sports, the discussion usually centers around one of two topics: Roosevelt’s
advocacy of the “strenuous life” or his role in reforming college football in 1905. Preeminent sports historians such as Elliott Gorn, Warren Goldstein, Benjamin Rader, Steven
Riess, and David Wiggins portray Roosevelt chiefly as an embodiment of the times.
Roosevelt “captured the frenetic energy of the age,” write Gorn and Goldstein.9 “No one
exemplified the strenuous life more fully than Theodore Roosevelt. . . . Roosevelt enthralled the nation with his vigor,” argues Rader.10 Theodore Roosevelt “epitomized in
the popularized versions of his doctrine of the strenuous life and the American belief in
‘athleticism,’” explains another source.11 Captured, exemplified, epitomized; these are the
appropriate yet somewhat passive descriptors often used to connect Roosevelt to America’s
growing sports culture.
Presidential biographers, not surprisingly, have not focused much of their attention
on Roosevelt’s ideas about athletics. Most take just a page or two to consider Roosevelt’s
sporting activities, usually not straying far beyond his commitment to the strenuous life.
Still, even in moving quickly over the athletic terrain of Roosevelt’s story, some of these
authors have done a disservice to Roosevelt, the Sports President. A contemporary of
Roosevelt, Harry F. Pringle, concludes bluntly in Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography (1931)
that Roosevelt sought social connections through sport, “this despite the fact that he was a
very bad athlete.”12 This is incorrect. While no champion, Roosevelt proved himself to be
capable as a boxer, tennis player, and horseman. Louis Auchincloss, in a much more
recent and scholarly account, links Roosevelt’s penchant for athletic activity directly, and
too simply, to his propensity to overeat. “TR needed a good deal of physical exercise,
particularly to control a waistline responding to his hearty meals,” Auchincloss reasons.13
This is not inaccurate; Roosevelt did battle his weight, but the reader would grossly underestimate the role of athletics in Roosevelt’s life if judging only from this source. Perhaps
most interesting and credible is Edmond Morris’ treatment of Roosevelt. In the Pulitzer
Prize-winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), Morris couples Roosevelt’s sometimes
excessive pre-presidency athletic activities to stress and anxiety. Examining Roosevelt’s
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behavior in 1895, for example:
Roosevelt’s activity became more and more strenuous as spring approached. He
dashed in and out of town on Civil Service Commission business, taught himself to ski. . . . [F]riends noticed hints of inner turbulence. He was seen “blinking pitifully” with exhaustion at a dinner for Owen Wister and [Rudyard]
Kipling, and his tirades on a currently fashionable topic—whether dangerous
sports should be banned in the nation’s universities—became alarmingly harsh.
‘What matters a few broken bones to the glories of inter-collegiate sport?’ he
cried at a Harvard Club dinner. . . . He declared publicly that he would “disinherit” any son of his who refused to play college games. And in private, through
clenched teeth: “I would rather one of them should die than have them grow
up as weakling.” Clearly he was under considerable personal strain.14
Given that this is one of just a handful of references to Roosevelt and athletics in Morris’
magisterial work, readers here too are left with not enough to grasp Roosevelt’s sporting
doctrine or activities.
Perhaps most misleading, many historians have succumbed to hyperbole when considering Roosevelt’s influence over American culture and its athletics. “If Emerson is the
John the Baptist of American sports, Teddy Roosevelt is literally the savior,” concludes
Robert Higgs and Michael Braswell.15 In his work Muscular Christianity: Manhood and
Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (2001), Clifford Putney contends, “Overestimating Roosevelt’s appeal—warlike and otherwise—to Protestant America would be hard to
do. . . . [W]hen Roosevelt died in 1919, the Boy Scouts of America spoke of him in terms
befitting a messiah.”16 On the issue of reforming football, the claim has been made (although it has been carefully qualified by scholars as well) that Roosevelt pushed through
reform, created the modern game, and “saved” football: “The President of the United
States had gotten the Football Rules Committee’s attention when no one else seemed able
to do so. He caused the group, for the first time in twenty five years, to change the
character of the game.”17 And when considering Roosevelt compared to other presidentathletes, John S. Watterson simply called Roosevelt “the Founding Father” and “the man
who changed everything.”18 Savior, messiah, and changer of everything; these too, if left
unqualified, are less than optimal descriptors of Roosevelt as the Sports President.
Images of Roosevelt the Athlete: “I Never Was a Champion at Anything”
The press and American public were captivated by the idea of Roosevelt, president of
the United States, as an athlete. Bookended by “little boy” William McKinley and the
doughy Howard Taft, Roosevelt the Sports President made for compelling newspaper
headlines. A representative sampling includes: “Roosevelt to Box,” “Roosevelt Now Jujutsu
Expert,” “President Romps with His Children…,” and “Roosevelt Wrestling Lesson:
Showed Senator Proctor How to Stand Opponent on His Head.”19 Tales of Roosevelt’s
physical vigor became a part of his standard campaign biography and presidential coverage. In the decades after Roosevelt’s death, historians have propagated this collective memory
of Roosevelt as an athlete.20
The athletic story remains familiar still to most anyone with even a cursory knowledge of T.R. A “sickly, delicate” boy, Roosevelt found confidence and health through
horseback riding, hiking, and boxing.21 Matriculating into Harvard at age fifteen, Roosevelt
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joined the crew team, although never rising above third-string. Later when cruelly confronted with the death of his wife and mother, Roosevelt left his seat in New York’s legislature behind and went west. In the Dakota Territory, Roosevelt hunted on the prairie,
killing 170 birds and animals during one prolific stretch. This he told the nation in his
autobiography.22 Roosevelt’s image as a hunter still forms a significant portion of the
generalist memory of a by-gone president. Field & Stream decades after Roosevelt’s death
printed a laudatory article featuring lavish prints of Roosevelt hunting, simply but sufficiently entitled “Theodore Roosevelt—Western Sportsman.”23
Roosevelt’s success as a Rough Rider at San Juan Hill and his subsequent call to live
the “strenuous life” further contributed to his image of physicality and strength.24 On
April 10, 1899, Roosevelt addressed the Hamilton Club in Chicago and urged Americans
to avoid lives of “slothful ease” or “timid peace.” The message reverberated loudly, especially in light of the Social Darwinist concerns of the times. The United States would
either, many believed, conquer or be conquered. Roosevelt warned that the United States—
particularly its men—must remain physically strong in order to win out in the ongoing
contest of nations.25 With this speech, Roosevelt solidified his image as a man of vigorous
action. In the years that followed, journalists and historians would connect this doctrine
of “the life of strenuous endeavor” to Roosevelt’s romps through wilderness areas and
interest in athletics.26
Even in the White House, Roosevelt remained an athlete. The press noted that
Roosevelt wrestled in the Oval Office, regularly hiked and rode through Rock Creek Park,
and even sparred occasionally.27 The president also became particularly fond of tennis.
He challenged his sons and visitors to lengthy matches, rain or shine. Roosevelt reportedly drubbed James Garfield on the court as the two men waited to hear the results of the
1902 Congressional races.28 In tennis, Roosevelt chose a game that was suspiciously effeminate. Numerous articles appeared in the late nineteenth century characterizing the
game as one meant for ladies. The Harvard Crimson concluded simply that the game was
“not a manly sport.”29 An Outing author attempted to clarify: tennis was indeed “a good
game for ladies” but not “a ‘ladies game,’ as some sarcastic people were once wont to call
it.”30 Roosevelt did not care; he played the game as often as his schedule allowed.
Further cementing his connection with athletics, Roosevelt regularly turned up in the
stands or on the sidelines of athletic contests. As the “First Fan,” Roosevelt took in dozens
of games. Attending the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia in 1901, the new
president became the story. Under the headline “The President a Boy Again,” one clearly
smitten scribe described the scene:
The spectacle of a President of the United States, silk hat in hand, leaping a
fence and cheering like mad, is not seen every fine afternoon, and Philadelphia
is making the most of it. . . . [The action] was too much for President Roosevelt.
He was no longer the dignified guider of a great nation’s fortunes. . . . [W]ith a
yell that was distinguishable above all the pandemonium there, he sprung from
his seat, leaped the little fence in front of him and was on the side lines.31
The event—a president jumping over a fence at a football game—was more strange
than truly noteworthy, but it, and other similar stories, contributed to Roosevelt’s athletic
reputation. As middle-age befell him, Roosevelt’s image as an athlete surpassed the reality.
Roosevelt struggled to control his weight and felt the limitations of age.32 For the most
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part though, even as the American people might have occasionally observed that the
president’s waistline grew and his spryness decreased during his tenure in office, the idea of
Roosevelt as an athlete remained pervasive.
Roosevelt’s Athletic Doctrine: “Cannot Help Preaching”
What makes Theodore Roosevelt different from other president-athletes (and makes
understanding his place in sports history more complex) was that he not only “played,”
but he felt compelled to theorize about the nation’s athletic activities. Roosevelt’s words, as
much as his actual athletic activities, shape the historical memory of Roosevelt as an athlete. Roosevelt, by his own estimation, was a rare breed: an “indoor and outdoor” man.
Most men, Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography, either “love out-of-doors . . . yet never
open a book” or “love books but to whom the great book of nature is a sealed volume.”33
Roosevelt demonstrated no such dichotomy. Over the course of his twenty years in the
public eye Roosevelt gradually expressed what became known as “the Roosevelt doctrine
as to sports.”34
Legal scholar Joshua Hawley’s Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness (2008) applies here.35 Roosevelt strayed often from the official business of the presidency to “preach”
his own version of righteousness and to encourage the American people towards what he
saw as progress.36 “The White House is a bully pulpit,” Roosevelt famously remarked, and
athletics did not escape Roosevelt’s preaching. The tenets of Roosevelt’s athletic ideology
reveal much about the man. The responses of the American populace to Roosevelt’s ideas
on athletics, in turn, provide an interesting case study on presidential persuasion beyond
the realm of legislation and politics. Or as political scientists have asked, “How far does
the President’s power to persuade go?”37
The Roosevelt athletic doctrine had four primary tenets. First, Roosevelt viewed
athletics as functional and utilitarian. Athletic events should produce positive change in
individuals and nations. Games were not to be played primarily for profit or even for the
game’s sake but rather to yield positive physical and character development. Prioritization
here mattered. “Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant,” Roosevelt wrote to his
children, “and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master.”38 Second, Roosevelt
favored those athletic activities that yielded and required the mastery of physical pain.
Roosevelt believed in tests of endurance, fortitude, and brute strength more than contests
of fine motor skills and tactics. This belief in the importance of pain did not mean that
Roosevelt favored only the “blood sports.” Indeed, among his many contradictions,
Roosevelt extolled the virtues of physical contact and pain, but he also (as mentioned
previously) found tennis to be sufficiently violent and challenging. But regardless of the
particulars of the sport, Roosevelt advocated activities that would leave its participants
exhausted and physically tested. Third, Roosevelt believed sports must not substitute for
one’s profession, service to society, or other life’s work. Roosevelt fought against the
professionalization of sports throughout his life. Fourth and finally, Rooseveltian athletics
were, by their very focuses on pain, strength, and character purification, meant for men.
Roosevelt’s doctrine of hyper-masculinity has been well-studied by historians, and it certainly applies to his athletic ideology as well. Sports historian Ronald A. Smith’s contention, for example, that “[n]o one was a greater exponent of the development of manly
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character than Harvard graduate Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the century” is in
keeping with the general historical interpretation.39
Encompassing these four tenets, Roosevelt’s optimism about the formative powers of
athletics seemed to have few boundaries. Before he became president, Roosevelt addressed
an audience of Yale men and declared that athletic endeavors might actually “purify the
civil life of the nation.”40 This notion, which Roosevelt proclaimed many subsequent
times, girded Roosevelt’s views on sport. Sport caused positive change. Asked another
time why he supported football, even at a time when it had become unpopular, Roosevelt
replied matter-of-factly, “I believe in athletic sports. I prize physical prowess for what it
shows of the courage and discipline that stand behind it.” Roosevelt continued on to
explain that athletic participation had even created better soldiers, “Of the Harvard men
in my regiment . . . I had two of the best quarterbacks, Thad Dean and Wrenn. . . . [I]f you
could see how men like Goodrich, and Wrenn, and Dean handled themselves, whether for
life or death, you would have been proud of the Harvard men.”41
With his philosophy that athletics served to mold a man, Roosevelt cared more about
participation than proficiency. He did not mind keeping score, but certainly the number
of tallies per side at the end of the game was of secondary importance to the lessons
learned. According to popular Social Darwinist thought, the fate of the United States
might be at stake. Strong men made, and protected, strong nations.42 Because of this
utilitarian approach to athletics, Roosevelt allowed his own four boys to pick their athletic
pursuits—as long as they did indeed participate. While Roosevelt favored boxing and
football, he supported his sons as they took part in running races, swimming, shooting,
and riding. Roosevelt did not overly push his sons towards winning. Roosevelt even held
himself up as an example of effort over success. “Personally I have always felt that I might
serve as an object lesson as to the benefit of good hard bodily exercise to the ordinary man.
I never was a champion at anything.”43 Years later Roosevelt would clarify: “It is far more
important that a man shall play something himself, even if he plays it badly, than that he
shall go with hundreds of companions to see someone else play it well. . . . [O]ur concern
should be most of all to widen the base, the foundation in athletic sports; to encourage in
every way a healthy rivalry which shall give the largest possible number of students the
chance to take part in vigorous outdoor games.”44
Coupled with the utilitarian emphasis on widespread participation, Roosevelt’s doctrine of useful athletics focused on those sports that produced physical pain for its participants. Roosevelt could appreciate the aesthetic beauty of a contest or an experience but
almost always secondarily to the challenge it provided. Roosevelt’s time in the West evidenced this pecking order. Roosevelt noted the exquisiteness of the landscapes of the
West, but he remembered his time there most distinctly for the hardships he had endured.
“We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as
they worked among the horses and cattle . . . but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins,
and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living,” he recalled.45
Roosevelt delivered his most comprehensive exegesis on the necessary physicality of
athletics in February of 1907. In the speech, Roosevelt extolled his fellow Harvard men to
lives of robust activity, courageous service, and to find the “courage to bear physical pain”:
We cannot afford to turn out college men who shirk from physical effort or
from a little physical pain. In any republic courage is a prime necessity for the
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average citizen if he is to be a good citizen; and he needs physical courage no less
than moral courage, the courage that dares as well as the courage that endures,
the courage that will fight valiantly alike against the foes of the soul and the foes
of the body. Athletics are good, especially in their rougher forms, because they
tend to develop such courage.46
Roosevelt’s belief that sports should teach pain management extended to his own
sons. Injuries happened; they should not deter participation. Writing to Theodore, Jr.
after hearing he had been injured played football Roosevelt clarified, “I do not in the least
object to your getting smashed if it is for an object that is worth while, such as playing on
the Groton team or playing on your class team when you get to Harvard.”47 As “Ted”
racked up injuries—a broken collar bone and a knocked out tooth among them—Roosevelt
wrote to the principal of the boy’s school to clarify that he wanted the boy to suffer but not
to the point where he could no longer play. “In addition to Ted’s collarbone, the dentist
tells me that he has killed one front tooth in football, and that tooth will get black. Now
I don’t care a rap for either accident in itself; but Ted is only fourteen and I am afraid if he
goes on like this he will get battered out before he can play in college.”48 In addition to
his views of utilitarian and arduous athletics, Roosevelt stressed that a man must not allow
sports to become his obsession. Roosevelt believed that professionalism corrupted athletics. Professional baseball received Roosevelt’s scorn a decade before ballplayers had their
first World Series. “When money comes in at the gate [specifically at baseball games],
sport flies out the window.”49 In an article written for The North American Review in
August of 1890, entitled “Professionalism in Sports,” Roosevelt framed professionalism as
the sludge created by America’s athletic engine. “Of course any good is accompanied by
some evil,” Roosevelt rationalized. “A small number of college boys . . . neglect everything
for their sports, and so become of little use to themselves or any one else. . . . The amateur
not the professional, is the desirable citizen, the man who should be encouraged,” Roosevelt
preached. Roosevelt further warned America against the “national decadence” of professional sports.50
Professional baseball’s popularity troubled the president, this despite the fact that the
professional game had won out over a strictly amateur one with the inauguration of the
National Association of Professional Base Ball Players decades earlier, in 1871. It was not
just professional baseball that concerned Roosevelt. Roosevelt also believed that professional rowing existed “under a dark cloud of suspicion.” Roosevelt, who long practiced
boxing, similarly condemned prize fighting—the same activity as he had practiced but for
money. “A prize-fight is simply brutal and degrading. The people who attend it, and
make a hero of the prizefighter, are excepting boys who go for fun and don’t know any
better, to a very great extent, men who hover on the border-line of criminality; and those
who are not speedily brutalized, are never rendered more manly.”51 Roosevelt’s distinction
between boxing and prize fighting demonstrated clearly that purpose mattered. To fight
for money offended Roosevelt. Professionalism propagated gambling and corruption to
an extent beyond what Roosevelt observed in amateur and university settings.
Roosevelt warned his boys to keep balance in their lives. Participate and play but do
not lose perspective about the function that athletics and sports should serve. “I am
delighted to have you play football,” Roosevelt wrote Ted. “But I do not believe in them
[athletics] if they degenerate into the sole end of any one’s existence.” Revealing his uniquely
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erudite approach to discussions even involving athletics, Roosevelt then queried his son in
a way that must have produced rolling eyes on the part of the latter. “Did you ever read
Pliny’s letter to Trajan, in which he speaks of it being advisable to keep the Greeks absorbed in athletics, because it distracted their minds from all serious pursuits, including
soldiering, and prevented their ever being dangerous to the Romans?” Roosevelt asked his
son. Not waiting for an answer, Roosevelt warned, “I have not a doubt that the British
officers in the Boer War had their efficiency partly reduced because they had sacrificed
their legitimate duties to an inordinate and ridiculous love of sports.”52
The final component of Roosevelt’s athletic doctrine has been more widely studied
than the first three. Roosevelt’s conception of “manliness” as a virtue and goal informed
his athletic choices, as it did his politics and personal relationships.53 Roosevelt assumed
that men would participate with and compete against other men in athletics. Roosevelt
addressed his athletic “sermons” to young men. On the other side of the gender ledger,
Roosevelt’s letters to his daughters Ethel and Alice never advocated strenuous activity.
When writing his letter on “good hard bodily exercise” to Pierre de Coubertin, Roosevelt
took pains to describe the athletic proclivities of each of his four boys but he made no
mention of his two daughters.54 While Roosevelt would advocate for equal rights for
women as laborers and voters during his presidency and when running as a Bull Moose
candidate in 1912, he did not question the sanctity of the masculine athletic field and
arena.55
Theodore Roosevelt throughout his life had many other priorities more important
than spreading his athletic doctrine. He focused on family, politics, diplomacy, education,
and any number of other issues before sports. Still, Roosevelt did make a much-noted case
regarding what athletics in America should look like. He made constant reference to
athletics and gave more than a dozen speeches addressing the proper role of sport during
his presidency. Additionally, the press cited his ideas on athletics regularly. In May of
1908, for example, the New York Times ran a lengthy article on the issue of what types of
athletic activities the president deemed acceptable for a Sunday.56 Book-ending a lifetime
of sports coverage, when Roosevelt died in 1919, many papers ran multi-installment commemorations of the former president. Several, such as the Boston Daily Globe, dedicated
one installment to “Roosevelt the Sportsman” and discussed Roosevelt’s “doctrine as to
sports.”57 It is this context—recognizing that Roosevelt had many other priorities but also
that his athletic ideas and exploits received unprecedented press coverage—that one must
lastly consider how Roosevelt’s ideas compared to those of the broader public.
Roosevelt as an Agent of Athletic Change:
“The Strenuous Life, Not Necessarily, However, of the Roosevelt Variety”
Roosevelt’s athletic idealism and enthusiasm inspired Americans. Roosevelt “set an
example of how a large, strenuous life could be led,” writes biographer Kathleen Dalton.58
Roosevelt’s speeches and exploits became prerequisite material for early sportswriters, those
coming on the journalistic scene at the turn of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most
famous of all Theodore Roosevelt’s memorable quotations involves an athletic analogy
and solace for those who have tried and failed. Speaking in France in 1910, Roosevelt
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declared:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man
stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs; who comes up short again
and again . . . who spends himself for a worthy cause, who at the best knows in
the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at
least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold
and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.59
The passage reverberates with Roosevelt’s athletic convictions. Although hopefully not
possessing a “cold and timid soul,” I’ll play the critic nonetheless. Because after examining
Roosevelt’s athletic image and his athletic doctrine one must then ask, how did Roosevelt’s
doctrine compare to the athletic activities of the broader public? Several key examples
serve to demonstrate that most of the sporting trends of the United States in the first two
decades of the twentieth century were not particularly Rooseveltian. This is not to say that
“the doer of deeds [Roosevelt] could have done them better” but rather to point out the
complexity and nuances inherent in Roosevelt’s role as the Sports President.
The Boston Daily Globe, during the debate over reforming college football in 1907,
captured the broad sentiment that Roosevelt set an admirable, but perhaps impractical,
standard for athletic vigor and sports purity. Regardless of politics or one’s view on college
football specifically, the Globe argued, “[L]et us all agree that [Roosevelt’s] preachments on
the strenuous life are needed by the nation.”60 Beyond Roosevelt’s general support for
athletics though, consensus was much harder to find. Of Roosevelt’s “preachments” on
athletics, the Globe concluded: “They gain their chief value, however, from the example of
the man behind them, for his practice is better than his preaching.”61
Newspapers focused on Roosevelt more as an athletic inspiration than as a practitioner of athletic policy. The press told and retold Roosevelt’s story of overcoming physical
ailments. The account always sold copy. “The American President became a star athlete,”
the Chicago Daily Tribune recounted in 1904, embellishing a bit, “a notable horseman, an
exceptional marksman, a famous hunter, a doughty wrestler, and a good boxer in spite of
some natural, though not constitutional, debilities.”62 As the country got to know its new
president in 1901, The Anecdotal Portrait of Colonel Roosevelt (1899) became a much cited
source.63 Pulling from the Portrait’s pages, one newspaper quoted Roosevelt as touting
“Aggressive fighting for the right” as the “greatest sport the world knows.”64
Americans liked having a fighter in the White House. They were glad to see “Youth
and Vigor Displacing Age and Wisdom in High Government Places,” as one Washington
Post headline described it.65 As a result, Roosevelt often received fawning press coverage.
Even simple headlines—“Mr. Roosevelt Romps with his Children and Goes to Church”—
portrayed Roosevelt as active and virtuous. The Post in March of 1909, with only four
days remaining in Roosevelt’s presidential tenure, summed up the invigorating effect of
Roosevelt’s leadership. “The country would have been shocked if another President had
converted the east room of the White House into an improvised wrestling ring; but because it was Roosevelt who did it, it applauded, and figuratively expanding its chest and
feeling its own muscles, exclaimed: ‘He’s one of us boys all the time. Hurrah for Teddy!’”66
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That Roosevelt made America “expand its chest and feel its muscles” is no small accomplishment, even if it is not an entirely quantifiable one.
The press coverage of Roosevelt the Sports President was not always positive. When
in 1908 Roosevelt tried to intervene to have suspensions of two members of Harvard’s
crew team reduced (in time for their upcoming competition against Yale), newspapermen
across the country rebuked the president for overstepping his bounds.67 Roosevelt’s advocacy of the strenuous life also occasionally elicited catcalls, especially as the maxim became
a catch-all slogan. Some newspapers responded to this over-saturation by publishing the
rules to a “non-strenuous life,” which included avoiding work, convincing others to do
one’s work, and then claiming the work probably did not need to be done anyhow.68
Occasionally newspapers also resorted to caricaturing Roosevelt’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for sports. In 1904, Roosevelt served as honorary president for the Olympic games held in St. Louis, Missouri. Roosevelt was a natural for the role. He and his
daughter Alice presented the victorious athletes with their prizes. Given his well documented enthusiasm for taking part, the Illustrated Sporting News and other newspapers
supposed that Roosevelt must be itching to jump into the competitions. “It may be taken
for granted that Mr. Roosevelt would rather be a contestant than an honorary ornament
of this great carnival of sport, if he were a few years younger and a few pounds lighter,” the
paper postulated. Then the gentle poking fun began:
The program is amazingly varied and extensive, yet it is even now to be regretted that the Olympic Games do not include “bronco-busting” from scratch,
chasing the mountain lion against the watch, and long distances springing over
high hurdles up the slope of a specially constructed San Juan Hill. The exhibition of such seductive pastimes as these might cause the Honorary President to
fidget uneasily on his Olympic throne, and to this list might be added vaulting
ambition, and an obstacle race for the White House Trophy, trail heats to be
run on the indoor track of Convention Hall.69
Witty, tongue-in-cheek, and slightly biting, such commentary revealed a perception among
some Americans that Roosevelt was, perhaps, too much of an admirable thing. His call to
live strenuously reverberated, but could anyone live up to such a standard?
The United States, beginning at the turn of the century and then taking off fully with
the wildly popular Jim Jefferies and Jack Johnson prizefight of 1910, pivoted away from
Roosevelt’s doctrine on athletics. On the whole, the nation embraced spectatorship over
participation and professional sports over amateur ones. The United States sporting public did not overtly reject Roosevelt’s vision for sports, but they did not follow lock in step
with Roosevelt either. In golf, professional Walter Hagan won his first U.S. Open in
1914, shattering golf ’s strident amateur clause. Professional baseball expanded steadily
from the 1901 agreement between the National and American Leagues and continued for
the next sixty years as the nation’s most popular and respected sporting activity. Women
too began to join in the athletic community, especially in tennis, beginning in the late
nineteenth century. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, among her many causes,
helped establish a women’s athletic club in Providence, Rhode Island.70
Developments in prizefighting, college football, and professional baseball in particular, during and after Roosevelt’s administration, demonstrate the complexity of Roosevelt’s
position in American sports culture. Roosevelt’s athletic image and persuasive speeches
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received significant attention, but they did not direct particular developments. The “bully
pulpit” mattered, but it did not, by any means, single-handedly win the sporting debates
in which Roosevelt engaged.
Roosevelt’s record on boxing and prizefighting defied easy categorization. Roosevelt
supported a “pure” version of hand-to-hand fighting but deplored the excesses that often
came with the sport. Roosevelt had taken up sparring at Harvard and continued the
practice in the White House. He had come to the sport of boxing as it was gaining a “gloss
of gentility” at the end of the nineteenth century.71 Roosevelt practiced boxing by the
Marquis of Queensberry rules, which required fighters to wear gloves, outlawed wrestling
moves, and called for three-minute rounds. As police commissioner of New York City,
Roosevelt had played a role in decriminalizing boxing. Or, more specifically, Roosevelt
had focused his efforts on ridding the city of corruption, gambling, and other vice, and on
improving the police force itself but left fighters alone if they simply wished to engage in
contests of physical strength.72 Then, it seemed, he switched sides. As the governor of
New York, Roosevelt pushed through a repeal of the statute allowing prizefighting in the
state. In his 1900 Annual Message, Governor Roosevelt urged legislators to send him a
bill reversing the Horton boxing law. “Boxing is a fine sport; but this affords no justification of prize fighting.” “The evils are greatly aggravated,” Roosevelt preached, “by the fact
that the fight is for a money prize, and is the occasion for unlimited gambling and betting.”73 The New York state legislature responded to their popular governor by passing a
repeal of the Horton law in April of 1900, which Roosevelt signed into law.
The “Fight of the Century,” pitting black champion Jack Johnson versus “The Great
White Hope,” Jim Jeffries in 1910, was not a Rooseveltian fight. Upon announcing the
long anticipated bout, fight promoters declared that Roosevelt would be issued a solid
gold ticket to the event.74 The venue for the fight switched from San Francisco to, ultimately, Reno, Nevada, when controversy arose over ties to gamblers in the Golden State.
As the combatants made various side bets, rumors swirled that one of the fighters would
take a fall. The boxers agreed to a forty-five round contest.75 With these loose standards,
Roosevelt did not attend. This was not his type of boxing. The Washington Post reported
that Roosevelt, “one of the greatest exponents of civic righteousness in the world,” wanted
to go to the fight but had been unable to alter his busy post-presidency schedule.76 This
explanation is unlikely. The fight went off as planned on July 4, 1910. Johnson won in a
rout. Then controversy broke out, and race riots ensued. Within days, Roosevelt signed
on to an effort to stop circulation of the fight film due to the fight’s role in heightening
race tensions.77
After the fight, Roosevelt took his most radical stand on athletics: he called for a
nation-wide ban on prizefighting. Roosevelt did not object to violence but rather to the
“enormous” and “demoralizing” money prizes and to the rampant gambling associated
with boxing. Headlines trumpeted Roosevelt’s new cause: “Roosevelt Hopes Reno Killed
Prize Fighting,” wrote the Atlanta Constitution.78 “I sincerely trust that public sentiment
will be so aroused, and will make itself felt so effectively, as to guarantee that this is the last
prize fight to take place in the United States,” Roosevelt editorialized in Outlook magazine
less than two weeks after the Johnson-Jeffries fight.79 He later joined a Massachusetts
effort to keep prizefighting out of Boston clubs.80 But prize fighting did not die out, in
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Boston, the United States, or elsewhere. Rather despite Roosevelt’s urgings, professional
boxing boomed over the next fifty years. Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Sugar Ray
Robinson—professional boxing champions all—became national celebrities in the first
half of the twentieth century.
Roosevelt’s call for amateurism and limited rounds in boxing did not go completely
unheeded. Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) clubs sprung up, teaching working professionals how to spar and become physically fit. Gentlemanly boxing kept a niche
in the United States. But boxing for prize money, boxing and gambling, and boxing as a
spectacle all became ubiquitous. Closer to home, the career path of son Kermit Roosevelt
also demonstrated the limits on Roosevelt’s influence. Kermit became a boxing promoter,
turning his back on his father’s advice to avoid spectacles where “a score or so exercise their
bodies while a multitude gains no exercise except for their lungs.”81 Kermit teamed up
with famed front man Tex Rickard, the primary promoter of the Johnson-Jeffries fight of
1910, to build and run Madison Square Garden.82
In dealing with college football, Roosevelt had another opportunity to put his athletic
doctrine into practice. Analyzing Roosevelt’s experiences in football reform again adds
complexity to the image of Roosevelt as the Sports President. Most significant in this light
is not Roosevelt’s influence (and he did indeed influence the trajectory of the college
game) but rather observing just how difficult and contested the fight for reform was. In
1905 and 1906, as has been well documented, college football stood at the precipice of
extinction. The wildly popular game faced a cadre of influential university leaders and
journalists who wanted the game banned. The outrage was, in many ways, justified.
During the 1905 season alone, eighteen players had been killed on the field. The headlines made even the most ardent fans of the gridiron cringe. The Chicago Tribune wrote of
football’s “Death Harvest.”83 The Atlanta Constitution reported, “Football Fills More
Coffins.”84 New York University and Columbia University called for banning the sport in
college altogether, and this at a time when other elite institutions such as Harvard, Princeton,
and Yale vied for top honors in the sport.85
Harvard University, Roosevelt’s alma mater and a perennial football champion, joined
much of the academic community in 1905 deliberating over the future of football. Harvard
football coach, Bill Reid, noted in his diary that his school was “pretty uneasy about the
present game of football.”86 The coach called on Roosevelt for support, and not for the
first time. Trying to secure a quarterback for his 1905 season, Reid had previously requested that President Roosevelt interfere with standard War Department protocol and
place strong-armed Charlie Daly at a post in Boston rather than Panama.87 Roosevelt had
ignored this preseason request but soon found himself embroiled in the college football
controversy.
Roosevelt was a college football fan. In addition to attending games, he had fought to
reinstitute the Army-Navy game, which had been discontinued in the 1890s, during his
tenure as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.88 Roosevelt had also made it a point to address
the Harvard football team at its banquet only months after arriving home from the Spanish-American War.89 Furthermore, Roosevelt encouraged his son Theodore, Jr. to play for
Harvard during the controversial 1905 season.90 Thus Reid and the college football community believed they had a friend—and a powerful one at that—in President Roosevelt.
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The Chicago Tribune also pushed Roosevelt to intervene, publishing an open letter
addressed to the president informing him that forty-five players had been killed between
1901 and 1905. “Body blows” had killed four, concussions six more, and spine injuries
the rest. The number of serious injuries was too high to count.91 Responding to these
reports, Roosevelt invited Bill Reid, Yale’s Walter Camp, and Princeton’s Arthur Hillenbrand
to join him, with Secretary of State Elihu Root, to sort out a solution. Roosevelt did not
want to ban football, later criticizing the “foolish people who desire to abolish football and
minimize athletics,” but he recognized that the rules needed reforming.92 The men discussed changes and adjourned with nothing more than a handshake deal. They agreed
that an “honorable obligation exists to carry out in letter and in spirit the rules of the game
of foot ball relating to toughness, holding and foul play.”93
Even with pressure from Roosevelt, however, change did not come immediately. Indeed dozens more deaths occurred in the years that followed. In 1906, thirty-six schools
did agree to establish the Intercollegiate Athletic Association as a regulatory body, but
Roosevelt’s alma mater Harvard held out joining until 1909. In 1910, the organization
renamed itself the National Collegiate Athletic Association and more significant reform
began. Exactly how much credit Roosevelt deserves for this development remains debated.94 “Savior” of the game of football has become an aspect of the historical memory of
Roosevelt. The Theodore Roosevelt Association (which is more of a fan club than historical source, to be sure) continues to tell this story. “Strange as it may seem,” the association’s
website reads, “high school football, college football, and even the Super Bowl might not
exist today if President Theodore Roosevelt had not taken a hand in preserving the
game. . . .”95 The NCAA itself has diligently interwoven its history with Roosevelt’s. The
NCAA’s official history is entitled, In the Arena, after Roosevelt’s famous speech and begins
with a description of Roosevelt’s role in reforming football and establishing the NCAA.96
While we can reasonably conclude that Roosevelt exerted a measure of influence over
the development of college football, a close historical examination reveals again that the
particulars of Roosevelt’s athletic solutions were often contested or even ignored. Roosevelt’s
public clash with the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, and his failure to convince
Columbia University to hold off on radically altering its athletic program demonstrate
Roosevelt’s limited influence on football. Eliot, shortly after Roosevelt called his meeting
with football leaders, declared that the football reform task would be Herculean. “It is
hard to bring about reform through the men who have long known about the existing evils
and have been largely responsible for their continuance,” Eliot stated, calling into question the president’s reform strategy.97
Two years later, with several new rules in place, Eliot still felt the game was unfit for
college men. “The game of football was somewhat improved by the new rules,” Eliot
wrote in his 1907 annual report, “. . . . [T]he spirit of the game, however, remains the
same.”98 Eliot’s threat to call off the 1908 season brought Roosevelt back to Harvard
where he made another impassioned plea for keeping the game. Still it was a close contest,
one where Roosevelt, president of the United States, hardly bullied his ideological opponent. The press reported that a tenuous compromise had been reached:
The agitation for and against football and Harvard has been long and bitter.
President Eliot has expressed himself as against the game time and again, and in
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his annual report, made public last week, he again characterized it as a game
which was too fierce for either students or spectators. Those in favor of continuing football were so fearful that they would lose in the contest that they
called President Roosevelt to their aid, and at a recent meeting at the Harvard
Union he spoke at length in favor of the game. It is believed that the remarks of
the President stayed the hands of those opposed to the sport, and that while
Harvard will play football in the coming season it will be under restrictions.
This is regarded as a compromise.99
So Roosevelt fought to a draw at Harvard but not without a very public clash of ideas and
without much margin to spare. Roosevelt later wrote Arthur T. Hadley, president of Yale
University, a note of thanks for keeping football. Roosevelt concluded that it took “wise
and sane as well as fearless” leadership on the part of academic leaders to beat back the
anti-football movement.100
Such leadership was apparently in short supply. Roosevelt failed to convince several
other prominent members of the academic community to continue their football programs. Columbia University, in Roosevelt’s home town of New York City and the school
where Roosevelt had studied law, shuttered its football program in 1906. California,
Georgetown (under the president’s glare in Washington, D.C.), and Stanford Universities
also abolished the game.101 Ignoring Roosevelt’s claim that football encouraged the development of courageous and non-“mollycoddle” men, Columbia’s President Nicholas Butler (later to join Roosevelt as a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) went on the offensive,
characterizing football as a disgrace to his university. “Do you not even understand even
this much,” President Butler wrote his alumni, “that disgraceful exhibitions react on those
who permit them?”102 Thus not even the support of the president of the United States
could convince many university presidents and faculty members that football could serve
and not sully the reputations of their institutions. Clearly the bully pulpit had its limitations when it came to the college gridiron.
The explosion of baseball attendance and the beginning of the modern World Series,
both during Roosevelt’s tenure as president, provide a further dose of perspective on
Roosevelt’s position in the development of American sports culture. Roosevelt had little
use for baseball. He did not watch or play the booming sport. “Father and all of us,” Alice
(Roosevelt) Longworth recalled, “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!”103 The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues attempted to lure the president to the ballpark by giving him a
lifetime pass to any major league game. It did not work. While Roosevelt never campaigned against baseball, his disinterest in the game did not go unnoticed. As the Washington Post reported somewhat regretfully, “With all of his love of outdoor life and sports, Mr.
Roosevelt did not go within the ball grounds during his seven years in the White House.”104
A scribe for the New York Times simply noted, “[Roosevelt’s] regard for baseball is not very
high.”105
In 1903 the first World Series occurred, and Roosevelt ignored the seminal event.
The nine-game series featured the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates against the American League’s Boston Americans. The players were all professionals. The unruly fans of the
two clubs interfered with play to such an extent that the teams finally agreed that any ball
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hit into the crowds lingering in the outfield would have to be ruled a ground rule double.106
Roosevelt certainly had enjoyed attending sporting events himself, so the fact that the fans
poured into the ballparks to watch the first World Series alone does not refute Roosevelt’s
ideas. What does, however, stand in contradiction to Roosevelt’s emphasis on every man
participating and sport functioning as a tool for building character, was the wild behavior
of the spectators. Roosevelt urged restraint and civility. Instead, Boston’s “Royal Rooters”
and Pittsburgh’s equally rambunctious supporters cheered wildly, drank aggressively, and
gambled openly.
During the beginning of the twentieth century, baseball fan behavior oscillated between passionate and dangerous. In 1907, a major league umpire was killed by a bottle
thrown from the stands. In 1912, Boston’s Royal Rooters rioted when they were denied
seats to game seven of the World Series. In a phenomenon that would have been inconceivable one generation earlier, super-fans, such as Mike “Nuf Ced” McGreevy of Boston,
became famous for being, well, fans.107 Roosevelt had wanted something different for
America. He wanted a majority of Americans to participate in athletic activities, not to
find an identity in watching.
While Roosevelt ignored baseball, millions of Americans each year packed the country’s
ballparks. In fact, Major League Baseball attendance increased more, by percentage, during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency than any other. The number of fans paying to attend
games annually doubled between 1901 and 1909 from 3,603,615 to 7,236,290108 Additionally, in 1905 sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding convened the Mills Commission to prove, in a way, that Roosevelt just did not get it. Baseball was not only popular, it
was thoroughly American. The Mills Commission’s final report, released on December
30, 1907, with Roosevelt still in the White House, found baseball to be a game invented
and perfected solely by Americans. Spalding echoed these sentiments in America’s National Game, published in 1911. “Base Ball has its patriotic side. . . . [T]his, together with
its distinctive American character and spirit and its peculiar adaptability to the American
temperament, have caused it to go on from year to year, gaining in power and popularity.”109 The research for the commission’s report and Spalding’s history of baseball was
wildly flawed, but this popular line of reasoning, too, highlighted that Roosevelt’s athletic
interests remained out of touch with those of many Americans.
Beyond the particulars of boxing, football and baseball, making sense of Theodore
Roosevelt’s place in American sports culture is a challenging task. There are, however,
several conclusions upon which historians can build. Certainly Roosevelt participated in
sports and expressed his ideas about athletics more frequently than the presidents who
came before or after him. John S. Watterson clarifies this point in The Games Presidents
Play (2006): “Although many of Roosevelt’s interests belong to the athletic culture of the
earlier century, he was actually a forerunner. More than anyone he represents a melding of
sports and politics that has now become commonplace.”110 Also, the press clearly focused
on Roosevelt as the Sports President. Roosevelt’s athletic feats and athletic doctrine were
covered exhaustively, to an extent that has not since been equaled. Lastly, Roosevelt succeeded in inspiring the nation. In the days following his death in fact, the Washington Post
and other papers grappled to find the words to explain Roosevelt’s emotional connection
with the American public. “Reason admonished us that he was mortal . . . but there was so
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much about him that was irrepressibly young and soaring in spirit.”111 Beyond these
foundational points, however, the history of Roosevelt as the Sports President gets considerably messier.
The complexity of Roosevelt’s role becomes apparent through an examination of the
details. Despite his effect on the public, Roosevelt was on the losing side of many athletic
trends. Roosevelt argued against professional sports to little avail. Roosevelt failed in his
quest to ban prizefighting. When Roosevelt waded into the contested waters of college
football reform, he found university presidents unwilling to cede ground on the subject to
the president of the United States. Additionally Roosevelt’s one-man boycott of baseball
(which stood out largely because Roosevelt seemed to embrace most other sporting activities) did not deter millions of fans from setting attendance records during his presidency
or the World Series from taking root as an American tradition. Taken in total, the evidence still supports the historical memory of Roosevelt as the Sports President. While
Roosevelt may not have been a sporting savior, he participated so widely and talked so
frequently about athletics that referring to him as the Sports President fits. But a close
examination of the evidence also requires an historical acquiescence to the fact that such a
simple designation, while useful and captivating, makes light of Roosevelt’s fascinating
contradictions in athletics and the very severe limitations on his influence in American
sporting culture. In short, Theodore Roosevelt took to the athletic field with uncommon
passion and to his pulpit to talk about athletics with unsurpassed frequency, but not even
he could bully the American public into participating in sports in an entirely Rooseveltian
way.
KEYWORDS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT, U.S. PRESIDENCY, BASEBALL V. BOXING,
PROGRESSIVE ERA
1
Matthew Futterman, Amy Chozick, “Is Obama the ‘Sports President?” Wall Street Journal, 29 April
2009, sec. B, p. 16.
2
John S. Watterson, The Games Presidents Play (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2006), 46.
3
Roosevelt’s 1899 speech has provided fodder for generations of historians and observers of the
presidency. Most recently see Katherine Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Knopf,
2002).
4
Joan Nesbitt, “Roosevelt May Be ‘The Father of the Annual Army-Navy Football Game,” The
University Record (University of Michigan), 11 September 2000, <ur.umich.edu/0001/Sep11_00/11.htm>
[15 November 2001]; Jim Casada, “Theodore Roosevelt: America’s Greatest Hunter,” Sports Afield, April/
May 2006, pp. 51-54; W.T. Stead, ed., The Review of the Reviews 24 (July-December 1901): 369; National
Collegiate Athletic Association, <http://www.ncaa.org/wps/portal/ncaahome?WCM_GLOBAL _CONTEXT=/wps/wcm/connect/ncaa/NCAA/Media%20and%20Events/Awards/Honors%20Program/
Theodore%20Roosevelt/winners.html> [10 August 2010].
5
Beyond these first-teamers, there are a plethora of other presidential sports connections. To mention a few, George W. Bush was a part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball club. Richard Nixon, after
failing to make it as a gridiron lineman at Whittier College, bowled in the basement of the Executive
Mansion. Perhaps most commonly, most U.S. presidents since Theodore Roosevelt (“a notably hopeless
golfer”) have occasionally retreated from the White House to the golf course, where according to recent
lore Pres. William J. Clinton cheated more egregiously than the average duffer. These activities have been
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chronicled mostly by journalists but also by some academicians interested in the recreational lives of
America’s leaders. For a recent and useful survey on U.S. presidents and athletics, see Watterson, The
Games Presidents Play.
6
Mark Dyreson, Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1998), 251.
7
Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from
Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: The Free Press, 1990). Neustadt, speaking more of the president’s relationship with Congress than influencing athletic culture, offered a valuable perspective on the limited
influence presidents sometimes have: “The power to persuade is the power to bargain. Status and
authority yield bargaining advantages . . . but outcomes are not guaranteed by his [the president’s] advantages” (p. 32).
8
In using the term “Sports President,” I am building once again upon the ideas of John S. Watterson.
Watterson considered the “sports presidency” and Roosevelt in a conference paper presented at the 32nd
annual meeting of North American Society for Sport History, 2004. See John S. Watterson, “Beyond the
Beltway,” North American Society for Sport History Proceedings and Newsletter, pp. 70-71.
9
Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2003), 138.
10
Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports
(Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, Prentice Hall, 2009), 129.
11
David K. Wiggins, ed., Sport in America: From Wicked Amusement to National Obsession (Champaign,
Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1994), 210.
12
Harry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography (New York: The Cornwall Press, 1931), 34.
13
Louis Auchincloss, Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001), 43.
14
Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, Modern Library
Paperback, 2001), 490-491. Morris does provide more robust coverage of Roosevelt’s athletic image and
exploits while in the White House in Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001).
15
Robert J. Higgs and Michael Braswell, An Unholy Alliance: The Sacred and Modern Sports (Macon,
Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2004), 373.
16
Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 35.
17
David M. Nelson, The Anatomy of the Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 97; John J. Miller, The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt
Saved Football (New York: Harper, 2011).
18
Watterson, The Games Presidents Play, 35, 47.
19
Special, “Governor Roosevelt to Box: Arranges for a Course of Lessons in Science of Using his
Fists and Wrestling,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 November 1899, p. 1; “Roosevelt Now Jujustu Expert,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 March 1902, p. 1; Special, “President’s Sunday at Oyster Bay: Mr. Roosevelt
Romps with his Children and Goes to Church,“ New York Times, 7 July 1902, p. 6; “Roosevelt Wrestling
Lesson,” Washington Post, 31 March 1907, p. 6.
20
For a very useful study on the problems and possibilities associated with “historical memory” and
“collective memory” methodologies, see Alan Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1386-1403.
21
Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son,
1926), 13-29.
22
Roosevelt’s diaries detailed his kills: “knocked the heads off 2 sage grouse,” “broke the back” of a
blacktail buck, and shot “clean through [a bear cub] end from end.” Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,
278-279.
23
Jim Merritt, “Theodore Roosevelt—Western Sportsman,” Field & Stream, September 1990, pp.
42-47.
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24
Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 23.
Roosevelt’s views on Social Darwinism were much studied during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. A
representative sampling of this very useful scholarship, and a more recent study, includes David H. Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Social Darwinism and Views on Imperialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas
26 (1965): 103-118; idem, Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1980); and Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels, Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan: The
Making of a President (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997).
26
Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” quoted in Theodore Roosevelt: Letters and Speeches, ed.
Louis Auchincloss (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2004), 755-766 ; Steven A. Riess,
Sports in North America: A Documentary History (Gulf Breeze, Flor.: Academic International Press, 1998),
204-205.
27
“Athletics at the White House,” Washington Post, 30 January 1905, p. 1; “Roosevelt Wrestling
Lesson,” Washington Post, 31 March 1907, sec. A, p. 4; Morris, Theodore Rex, 11; letter, Theodore Roosevelt
to Archie Roosevelt, 8 November 1908, in Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph B. Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt’s
Letters to His Children (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 232-233.
28
Morris, Theodore Rex, 280-281.
29
“Lawn Tennis Again,” Harvard (University) Crimson, 19 April 1879.
30
Henry Slocum, “Lawn Tennis As a Game for Women,” Outing, July 1889, pp. 289-300.
31
“President Roosevelt and Daly,” Boston Daily Globe, 1 December 1901, p. 2.
32
Morris, Theodore Rex, 236-237, 452.
33
Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, 318.
34
“Roosevelt as a Sportsman,” Boston Daily Globe, 5 February 1919, p. 10.
35
Joshua Hawley, Theodore Roosevelt: Preaching of Righteousness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 2008).
36
“‘Teddy’ Their Hero,” Washington Post, 27 May 1910, p. 5.
37
Michael Bailey, Lee Sigelman, and Clyde Wilcox, “Presidential Persuasion on Social Issues: A
Two-Way Street?” Political Research Quarterly 56 (2003): 49.
38
Letter, Theodore Roosevelt to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., 4 October 1903, in Theodore Roosevelt:
Letters and Speeches, ed. Auchincloss, 261-266.
39
Ronald A. Smith, Big-Time Football at Harvard, 1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994),
xvii.
40
“Yale Cheer for Roosevelt,” New York Times, 21 November 1899, p. 6.
41
“Harvard Men Rejoice,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 December 1898, p. 6.
42
Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 148.
43
Letter, Theodore Roosevelt to Pierre de Coubertin, 15 June 1903, in Theodore Roosevelt: Letters
and Speeches, ed. Auchincloss, 266-268.
44
“President Roosevelt Urges Harvard Men to Activity,” Boston Globe, 23 February 1907, p. 4.
45
Roosevelt, Autobiography, 93-94.
46
“President Roosevelt Urges Harvard Men.”
47
Letter, Theodore Roosevelt to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., 11 October 1903, in Roosevelt and Bishop,
Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children, 66.
48
Letter, Theodore Roosevelt to Endicott Peabody, 4 January 1902, in Theodore Roosevelt: Letters and
Speeches, ed. Auchincloss, 245.
49
Braven Dyer, “Case for Grid ‘Gates’ Awarded to Colleges,” Los Angeles Times, 22 October 1934,
pp. 9-10; The Baseball Almanac, <http://www.baseball-almanac.com/prz_qtr.shtml> [15 February 2009].
50
Theodore Roosevelt, “Professionalism in Sports,” The North American Review, August 1890, p.
188.
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51
Roosevelt, “Professionalism in Sports,” 191.
Letter, Theodore Roosevelt to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., 3 October 1903, in Theodore Roosevelt’s
Letters to His Children, eds. Roosevelt and Bishop, 61-62.
53
For a recent discussion on Roosevelt’s “manliness,” see Harvey Mansfield, “The Manliness of
Theodore Roosevelt,” The New Criterion 23 (2005), <www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/the-manliness-of-theodore-roosevelt-1247> [15 November 2011].
54
Letter, Theodore Roosevelt to Pierre de Coubertin, 15 June 1903, in Theodore Roosevelt: Letters
and Speeches, ed. Auchincloss, 267-269.
55
For more on Roosevelt and gender identity, see Rob Hardy, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Masculine/Feminine Complex,” New England Review 26 (2005): 176-187; Arnaldo Testi, “The Gender of
Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity,” Journal of American History 81
(1995): 1509-1533; Gary Gerstle, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1280-1307.
56
“Roosevelt’s Sunday Walks,” New York Times, 24 May 1908, p. 9.
57
James Morgan, “Roosevelt as Sportsman,” Boston Daily Globe, 5 February 1919, p. 10.
58
“The Strenuous Life: Not Necessarily, However, of the Roosevelt Variety,” Boston Daily Globe, 4
March 1900, p. 41; Kathleen Dalton, “Finding Theodore Roosevelt: A Personal and Political Story,”
Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era 6 (2007): 41.
59
Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic: Address at the Sorbonne, Paris, 23 April 1910,”
in Theodore Roosevelt: Letters and Speeches, ed. Auchincloss, 781-782.
60
“Dudley,” “The MollyCoddle Peril,” Boston Daily Globe, 10 March 1907, p. 36.
61
Ibid.
62
J.H. Raftery, “President and Emperor as Physical Culturists,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 13 November 1904, sec. E, p. 2.
63
Perriton Maxwell, “An Anecdotal Portrait of Colonel Roosevelt,” True Stories of Heroic Lives: Stirring Tales of Courage and Devotion of Men (New York: Bunk & Wagnalls Company, 1899), 69-76.
64
“Sidelights on Pres. Roosevelt’s Character,” The Atlanta Constitution, 6 October 1901, sec. A, p. 6.
65
George Robert Agnews, “Young and Vigor Displacing Age and Wisdom in High Government
Places,” Washington Post, 9 September 1906, p. SM4.
66
Fred Starek, “Activities of Roosevelt Make Him Unique Figure among the American Presidents,”
Washington Post, 1 March 1909, p. 2.
67
Ronald Smith, “Sport, Politics, and Harvard: A Little Lesson in Honor for Teddy Roosevelt,” New
England Quarterly 54 (1981): 412-416.
68
“The Non-Strenuous Life,” Washington Post, 10 May 1903, sec. E, p. 11.
69
Illustrated Sporting News, 9 April 1904, p. 2.
70
Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 134-136.
71
Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1986), 185-189, 205.
72
For a compelling, although sparsely footnoted, chronicle of Roosevelt’s two-year tenure as Commissioner of Police in New York City, see H. Paul Jeffers, Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore
Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895-1897 (New York: John Wily & Sons, Inc., 1994).
73
“Gov. Roosevelt’s Annual Message,” New York Times, 4 January 1900, p. 6.
74
“Roosevelt to Get First Fight Ticket,” New York Times, 26 April 1910, p. 12.
75
For an excellent description of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, see Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 157-212.
76
Frederic J. Haskin, “Prize Fight Legislation,” Washington Post, 17 June 1910, p. 11.
77
“Gainst [sic] Fights and Pictures,” Boston Daily Globe, 14 July 1910, p. 5.
78
“Football Fills More Coffins,” Atlanta Constitution, 14 July 1910, p. 3.
52
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79
Theodore Roosevelt, “The Recent Prize Fight,” Outlook 95 (1910): 550–551.
“Boxers’ Board Bill Rejected,” Boston Daily Globe, 10 April 1913, p. 16.
81
“Dudley,” “The Mollycoddle Peril.”
82
“Kermit Roosevelt Now a Fight Promoter,” Boston Daily Globe, 13 July 1923, p. 9; “Kermit
Roosevelt Witness for ‘Tex,” 25 March 1922, p. 4.
83
“Football Year’s Death Harvest,” Chicago Tribune, 26 November 1905.
84
Atlanta Constitution, 25 November 1909.
85
“No More Football,” Los Angeles Times, 29 November 1905, p. 11; “No Columbia Football, Says
Professor Kemp,” New York Times, 14 February 1906, p. 6.
86
Ronald A. Smith, Big-Time Football at Harvard, 1905: The Diary of Coach Bill Reid (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994), 266.
87
Ibid., 36.
88
“Football,” Los Angeles Times, 5 June 1899, p. 10.
89
“Roosevelt to Go to Boston,” New York Times, 26 November 1898, p. 7.
90
“Football Investigation,” Washington Post, 12 November 1905, p. SP1.
91
“Football Year’s Death Harvest,” Chicago Tribune, 26 November 1905
92
Letter, Theodore Roosevelt to Arthur Twining Hadley, 1 August 1906, in Theodore Roosevelt:
Letters and Speeches, ed. Auchincloss, 487–489.
93
Smith, Big-Time Football at Harvard, 194.
94
For more on the debate of Roosevelt’s role in NCAA football reform, see Mark Bensen, “T.R. and
Football Reform,” College Football Historical Society Newsletter, May 2003, pp. 1-5; Miller, “The Big
Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football”; Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life; Kathleen
Valenzi, ed., Champion of Sport: The Life of Walter Camp, 1859-1925 (Charlottesville, Va.: Howell Press,
1990); John S. Watterson, “The Gridiron Crisis of 1905: Was it Really a Crisis?” Journal of Sport History
27 (2002): 291-298; Andrew Zimbalist, Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time
College Sports (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
95
Theodore Roosevelt Association, “TR Saves Football,” <http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/
kidscorner/football.htm> [13 December 2010].
96
Joseph N. Crowley, In the Arena: The NCAA’s First Century (Indianapolis, Ind.: NCAA, 2006).
97
“Hard Job Ahead for Roosevelt,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 October 1905, p. 10.
98
“Football Too Fierce,” Washington Post, 7 March 1907, p. 9.
99
“Wide World of Sport,” Washington Post, 14 March 1907, p. 8. Emphasis is author’s.
100
Roosevelt to Hadley letter.
101
Watterson, “The Gridiron Crisis,” 291-298.
102
“The Football Controversy,” New York Times, 15 June 1907, p. 8.
103
Arthur Krock, “In the Nation: Why Taft Tossed the First National Baseball,” New York Times, 11
April 1961, p. 36.
104
“Taft Joins the Fans,” Washington Post, 20 April 1909, p. 3.
105
“Roosevelt’s Sunday Walks,” New York Times, 24 May 1908, p. 9. This Times writer assumed
(incorrectly, I believe) that the president had attended at least a few games during his lifetime: “During all
the years of his residence in Washington he has not attended more than half a dozen games.”
106
Roger I. Abrams, The First World Series and the Baseball Fanatics of 1903 (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 2003), 101-103.
107
John Thorn and Pete Palmer, eds., Total Baseball: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Baseball (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 2340-2341.
108
Ibid., 144-145.
109
Albert G. Spalding, America’s National Game: Historic Facts concerning the Beginning, Evolution,
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Development and Popularity of Base Ball (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1911; reprint
ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 368.
110
Watterson, The Games Presidents Play, 37.
111
“Theodore Roosevelt,” Washington Post, 7 January 1919, p. 6.
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