‘America's Athletic Missionaries’: Political Performance, Olympic Spectacle and the Quest for an American National Culture, 1896–1912

Abstract

In an era of massive immigration and intense debate over the constituent elements necessary for guaranteeing a unified national culture, many Americans identified sport as a crucial tool for building commonweal. At the same time, the creation of the modern Olympics provided the US with an opportunity to measure itself against other nations. A wide variety of commentators began to identify US Olympians as ‘athletic missionaries’, literal examples to both domestic and foreign audiences of the strength of American civilization. Interpretations of US victories held that American athletes won Olympic victories not because of superior athleticism but because they hailed from a superior society enriched by a ‘melting pot’ that turned immigrants into productive citizens. These discourses illuminated the early history of American efforts to craft patriotism at the Olympics.

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 1 (1992): 70–91.

Notes

[1] Edward Bayard Moss, ‘America's Athletic Missionaries’, Harper's Weekly, 27 July 1912.

[2] My study has been greatly influenced by John J. MacAloon's scholarship on Olympic ‘spectacle’ as cultural performance. See his ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies’.

[3] See Geertz's influential essay, ‘Notes on a Balinese Cockfight’, 448.

[4] Edward Bayard Moss, ‘America's Olympic Argonauts’, Harper's Weekly, 6 July 1912.

[5] The historians of sport were engaged in a process, typical of the progressive mentality, which Robert Crunden has labelled ‘innovative nostalgia’. They linked their arguments for modernist reform with a historicist sensibility, grounding their programmes for change within the broad framework of the Western tradition: Crunden, Ministers of Reform. For examples of the formula as regards the strenuous life see Hibbard, ‘The Sporting Spirit: Ancient and Modern’; H.H.M., ‘Greek vs. Modern Physical Culture’; Lynch, ‘The Greek Olympic Games Compared with Modern Athletics’; Collier, ‘The Ethics of Ancient and Modern Athletics’. On links between sport and nationalism see Pope, Patriotic Games; Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality; Levine, A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball; and Holt, Sport and the British. On the relations between cultural motifs and nationalism see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780.

[6] Dodge, ‘Rural Recreations’, 307.

[7] On the effort to construct a national culture see Croly, The Promise of American Life; Lippmann, A Preface to Politics; Weyl, The New Democracy. The ‘politics of culture’ is explored in Perry, Intellectual Life in America, 261–75; Altschuler, Race, Ethnicity, and Class in American Thought, 99–113; and Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 140–81. See also Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory; Lears, No Place of Grace.

[8] Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 287–317.

[9]The usage, as a definition of the ideology and institutions of modern sport, was clearly established in 1888. ‘Athletism is one of the distinctive forces of the nineteenth century’, declared an American observer of the rapidly expanding late nineteenth-century sporting systems. ‘And of all the forces, acting upon the social, moral and physical life of the century, it is probably destined to be the most permanent in its effects’. Turner, ‘The Progress of Athletism’, 109.

[10] According to Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘class is a notion that is inherently fuzzy at the edges’: Fear of Falling, 13. In employing class as an explanatory device I have intentionally focused on the shared ideological and aspirational structures, as well as on relations to modes of production, while realizing – as Ehrenreich does – that class is an abstraction of historical realities, and a meaningful one. In developing my perspective on the pivotal role of the middle class in defining and shaping American perceptions, and the connections of the ‘new’ middle class to the emerging corporate order in fin de siècle America, I have drawn on Ehrenreich's provocative work as well as the seminal studies of Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order; Mills, White Collar; Altschuler, Race, Ethnicity and Class in American Social Thought; Jones, The Age of Excess; Baritz, The Good Life; Crunden, Ministers of Reform; Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America; and Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America.

[11]‘Play for the People’. The Independent 62 (28 Feb. 1907), 514.

[12] Kyle, ‘E. Norman Gardiner and the Decline of Greek Sport’.

[13] Bryce, ‘A Plea for Sport’, 523.

[14] A prototypical exposition of the creed reads: ‘Now, in all civilized countries of the modern world, and especially in countries of advanced economic development and of a form of government like that of the United States, success and progress depend chiefly on the presence of certain personal characteristics’ (H. Addington Bruce in an essay entitled ‘Baseball and the National Life’). ‘Physical fitness, courage, honesty, patience, the spirit of initiative combined with due respect of lawful authority, soundness and quickness of judgement, self-confidence, self-control, cheeriness, fair-mindedness, and appreciation of the importance of social solidarity, of “team play” – these are traits requisite as never before for success in the life of an individual and of a nation’. Bruce, ‘Baseball and the National Life’, 105.

[15]‘The Building of Muscle’, Harper's 69, August 1884, 385.

[16] John J. MacAloon (‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies’, 255–6) has made some provocative insights into the structure of games and sports as ‘semantic/symbolic/communicative systems’ and the idea that sport performs as an important semiotic ‘code’ in modernizing societies.

[17] Turner, ‘The Progress of Athletism’, 109.

[18] The symbols of community and modernist energies met in explicit conjunction in Bryce's ‘Plea for Sport’ 518–24: ‘We have engrafted on classic times the steam-engine, the telegraph, and the telephone, whose result is the progress of the nineteenth century’, he surmised. The modern world needed the culture-building power of sport, thought Bryce. He believed that ‘athletism’ might produce a global culture of shared norms, arguing that the America's Cup had done more than the diplomatic arbitration of economic claims for cementing Anglo-American friendship.

[19] Bryce, ‘A Plea for Sport’, 524.

[20] MacAloon, ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies’; MacAloon, This Great Symbol.

[21] MacAloon, ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies’, 245. Spectacle, a genre of cultural performance in which visual and symbolic codes gain primacy, designed for public display in mass society, and peculiarly and directly coded to the modern dilemma of distinguishing appearance from reality, symbolizes the modernist tension between the hoped-for consensual community and the demand for individual autonomy. Participation in spectacle is a voluntary decision that opens the possibility, according to MacAloon, of ‘a strange double dynamic’. He argued that spectacle both reduced experience to ‘mere appearance’ and opened windows to see behind and beyond stereotyped images by ‘re-presenting’ them in ‘evocative’ new forms.

[22] Lanier, ‘In the Field of International Sport’, 575–78.

[23]‘For the Olympian Games’, New York Times, 22 March 1896; ‘Princeton Will Send Team to Athens’, New York Times, 17 March 1896; Mandell, The First Modern Olympics.

[24]‘The New Olympic Games’, The Chautauquan 23 (July 1896), 263.

[25]‘The Olympian Games’, New York Times, 8 April 1896.

[26]‘In regard to field- and track-athletics there is likely to be less national jealousy, than in other forms of contests’, continued Sloane. ‘From the very outset, in the first Olympic gathering at Athens, common ground for friendly emulation was easily established’: Sloane, ‘The Olympic Idea’, 409–10.

[27] Richardson, ‘The New Olympic Games’, 281.

[28] Connolly, ‘An Olympic Victor’, 210.

[29] Ibid.

[30] In historical studies Gene Wise pushed for a new strategy for understanding the relationship between ideas and experience in human life based on the cognitive creed. Wise labelled the technique ‘perspectivism’, and urged scholars to concentrate as much on the inside of ‘explanation-forms’ as they do on the outside – the social context. An ‘explanation-form’ is the perspective, the frame of reference, or in Thomas Kuhn's jargon, the paradigm, through which people apprehend experience. Wise realized that all historical data is impressionistic. Historical statistics provide certain impressions and give certain ‘explanation-forms’ to experience. Religious tracts giver different impressions, and provide different explanations. Wise, American Historical Explanations.

[31]‘I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease where men must win at hazard of their lives at risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world.’ Theodore Roosevelt, ‘The Strenuous Life’, a speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, 10 April 1899; cited in Hagerdorn, American Ideals, the Strenuous Life, Realizable Ideals, 331.

[32]‘Seven More Victories’, Chicago Tribune, 17 July 1900.

[33] Whitney, ‘The Sportsman's View-Point: Mug Hunters and Disregarded Agreements at Paris Games’, 566.

[34] Whitney, ‘The Sportsman's View-Point: Records of American Athletes Abroad’, 677.

[35] Henry and Yeomans, An Approved History of the Olympic Games, 47–8.

[36] Boyesen, ‘The Most Athletic Nation in the World’, 83.

[37]‘Yankee Athletes Barred’, New York Times, 16 July 1900; ‘Americans Win at Paris’, Chicago Tribune, 16 July 1900; ‘Americans Again Lead’, New York Times, 17 July 1900; ‘Paris Games Terminate’, New York Times, 23 July 1900. Prinstein and Kraenzlein were long time rivals. The sports columnist for the New York Mail & Express, Malcolm Ford, reported that Prinstein wrote him to claim that Kraenzlein ‘broke faith with him personally’ in the Olympic long jump incident. Postal et al., Encyclopedia of Jews in Sport.

[38] Lucas, The Olympic Games: 1904; ‘Olympic Games in America’, New York Times, 28 July 1900; James Edward Sullivan, ‘Review of the Olympic Games of 1904’, in Spalding's Official Athletic Almanac for 1905; Lucas, The Modern Olympic Games, 67–71; Guttmann, The Games Must Go On, 12–22.

[39]‘Olympian Games Begin Today’, Chicago Tribune, 29 Aug. 1904.

[40]‘World's Championship Trophy for NYAC’, New York Times, 22 Nov. 1904.

[41]‘The Olympic Games’, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 28 Aug. 1904, Scrapbook 1904 B, United States Olympic Committee Archives, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

[42] Sullivan, Spalding's Almanac for 1905, 161.

[43] Karopothakes, ‘The Olympic Games’The Nation 82 (7 June 1906), 466–7; Sullivan, ‘American Athletes in Ancient Athens’.

[44] Sullivan, ‘American Athletes Champions of the World’.

[45] Sullivan, Spalding's Athletic Almanac for 1907, 218.

[46]‘The Higher Athletics’. The Nation 85 (5 Dec. 1907), 510. Godkin retained the editorship until 1899. After Godkin stepped down from his command post in 1899, his long-time partner, managing editor Wendell Phillips Garrison (the third son of William Lloyd Garrison) continued the anti-athletic stance of commentaries by the influential critical weekly. Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. III, 331–56.

[47]‘The Athletes of the Nations’, The Living Age 257 (13 June 1908), 699.

[48]‘Chronicle and Comment: The Olympic Muddle’. The Bookman 28 (Oct. 1908), 104–5.

[49] Whitney, ‘The View-Point: Olympic Games American Committee Report’, 244.

[50]‘The Olympic Squabbles’, Collier's 41 (12 Sept. 1908), 10.

[51]‘Mr. Roosevelt and the Athletes’, New York Times, 2 Sept. 1908.

[52] Associated Press and Grolier, Pursuit of Excellence, 64.

[53] Walter Camp, ‘The Olympic Games’. Collier's 41 (5 Sept. 1908), 22.

[54] James B. Connolly, ‘The Shepherd's Bush Greeks’, Collier's 41 (5 Sept. 1908), 12.

[55] Finley Peter Dunne, ‘“Mr Dooley” on the Olympic Games’, American Magazine 66 (Oct. 1908), 615–17.

[56] Connolly, ‘The Spirit of the Olympian Games’, 104.

[57] MacAloon, ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies’, 262–3.

[58] Moss, ‘America's Olympic Argonauts’.

[59]‘Col. Thompson Praises America's Olympic Athletes’, New York Times, 25 Aug. 1912.

[60] Will T. Irwin, ‘The Olympic Games’, Collier's 50 (10 Aug. 1912), 9; Irwin, The Making of a Reporter, 182.

[61]‘The Stars and Stripes at the Olympic Games’, Current Literature 53 (Aug. 1912), 131.

[62] Sullivan, The Olympic Games: Stockholm 1912, 220.

[63]‘Our Olympic Laurels’, Literary Digest 45 (27 July 1912), 132.

[64] Carl Crow, ‘America First in Athletics’, The World's Work 27 (Dec. 1913), 191–4.

[65] Sullivan, The Olympic Games: Stockholm 1912, 101.

[66]‘Col. Thompson Praises America's Olympic Athletes’.

[67] Finley Peter Dunne, ‘Dooley on Supremacy of the English in Athletics’, New York Times, 28 July 1912.

[68] Sloane, ‘The Greek Olympiads’, in AOC, Report of the American Olympic Committee, 1920, 59.

[69] Sloane, ‘Modern Olympic Games’, in AOC, Report of the American Olympic Committee, 1920, 83.