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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2016
The Olympic sporting context of 1908, with its tension between nationalistic competition and high-minded amateurism, provides insight as well into the transatlantic relationship between Great Britain and the United States during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and in the years following the prime ministerial tenure of Britain's Arthur Balfour. The article explores this relationship through two high-profile sports events—the 1908 London Olympic Games and its predecessor games in St. Louis in 1904—to consider how governing political and social networks in the two countries viewed themselves and one another and related to one another. The positions and values of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour are reevaluated in this context. The article concludes that the 1908 Olympics in many ways typified Anglo-American relations during the opening decade of the twentieth century. Strenuous competition between the two nations was accepted by both parties as a means to achieve a measure of superiority over the other for the broader audience in each nation and also across the globe.
1 Bill Mallon and Jeroen Heijmans, Historical Dictionary of the Olympic Movement, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 210–11.
2 Theodore Roosevelt, The Hamilton Club, Chicago, Apr. 10, 1899. Roosevelt's speech appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Apr. 11, 1899, the day after it was delivered, and was subsequently published in Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: The Century Co., 1900).
3 See R. J. Q. Adams, Balfour: The Last Grandee (London: John Murray, 2007).
4 In S. H. Jeyes, “Our Gentlemanly Failures,” The Fortnightly Review 61, new series (Jan.–June 1897): 387; also cited in J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown's Universe: The Development of the English Public School in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Millington, 1977), 117.
5 Theodore Roosevelt to George C. Buell, Aug. 18, 1908, in Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. H. W. Brands (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 499.
6 George R. Matthews, “The Controversial Olympic Games of 1908 as Viewed by the New York Times and the Times of London,” Journal of Sport History 7 (Summer 1980): 40.
7 Allan Nevins, Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), v.
8 Nevins, Henry White, 16. White's family had left the United States after the Civil War, and he was educated in Rome and Paris, becoming proficient in those languages. White would also attend, at the Paris Peace commission after the Great War, some meetings of the Council of Ten that included Balfour, in the latter's capacity as British foreign secretary. Nevins, Henry White, 366.
9 Nevins, Henry White, 79.
10 Nevins, Henry White, 294.
11 J Simon Rofe, “Europe as the Nexus of Theodore Roosevelt's International Strategy” in America's Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the “Discovery” of Europe, eds. Hans Krabbendam and John Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 180, 189.
12 Theodore Roosevelt, The Romanes Lecture 1910: Biological Analogies in History (London: Clarendon Press, 1910), available via Wikisource Web Archive, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Biological_Analogies_in_History.djvu/7 (accessed July 23, 2014).
13 Theodore Roosevelt, “The Conditions of Success,” address at the Cambridge Union, May 26, 1910, 11–12, available at www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/ConditionsofSuccess.pdf. (accessed July 23, 2014).
14 Arthur James Balfour, Criticism and Beauty: A Lecture Rewritten, Being the Romanes Lecture for 1909 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), available via Wikisource Web Archive, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Criticism_and_Beauty (accessed July 23, 2014).
15 New York Times, Nov. 2, 1908.
16 Of studies of Gilded Age culture and politics, the following particularly informed this study: Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
17 On TR's understanding and appreciation of the United Kingdom, see William Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft, (New York: St Martin's Press, 1997). See also Howard, K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956); Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex, (New York: Random House, 2001); and Gregory Russell, The Statecraft of Theodore Roosevelt: The Duties of Nations and World Order, (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Republic of Letters, 2009).
18 Theodore Roosevelt to Alfred Mahan, Feb. 14, 1900, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Roosevelt Study Centre Middelburg, the Netherlands [hereafter cited as TRP RSC].
19 Theodore Roosevelt to George H. Putnam, Dec. 5, 1918, TRP RSC.
20 William Tilchin, “Anglo-American Partnership: The Foundation of Theodore Roosevelt's Foreign Policy” in A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Serge Ricard (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 314.
21 Tilchin, “Anglo-American Partnership,” 324.
22 Ruddock Mackay and H.C.G. Matthew, “Balfour, Arthur James, First Earl of Balfour (1848–1930),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), available at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30553 (accessed July 23, 2014).
23 Roosevelt, The Romanes Lecture 1910: Biological Analogies in History.
24 Theodore Roosevelt to George H. Putnam, Dec. 5, 1918, TRP RSC.
25 Theodore Roosevelt, Annual Message, Dec. 6, 1904, excerpt at www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=56&page=transcript (accessed July 23, 2014).
26 Baron Pierre De Coubertin, “The Work of the International Olympic Committee” in The Olympic Games Stockholm 1912 (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1912). Another shared attitude expressed by the two men was a mutual aversion to professionalism in sports.
27 Owen Wister, “Theodore Roosevelt: The Sportsman and the Man,” Outing (June 1901): 247.
28 A. J. Balfour in Arthur James Balfour as Philosopher and Thinker: A Collection of the More Important and Interesting Passages in His Non-political Writings, Speeches and Addresses, 1879–1912, ed. Wilfrid M. Short (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), 276, 278.
29 Mackay and Matthew, “Balfour, Arthur James, First Earl of Balfour (1848–1930).” Adams, Balfour, 191–92, also discusses Balfour's passion for golf and relaxed demeanor on his private course at Whittingehame.
30 Balfour's sister Eleanor, who married her Cambridge tutor, the university reformer Henry Sidgwick, became Newnham College's second principal in 1892. She was a strong proponent of organized games and sport for women, which both Newnham and Girton College pioneered. She promoted the college's field hockey club and ground; encouraged Newnhamites to form rowing, croquet, cricket, swimming, fencing, and lacrosse clubs or societies; and permitted mixed sets with men in lawn tennis. See Kathleen E. McCrone, Playing the Game: Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women 1870–1914 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988), 34–38.
31 T. W. Bamford, The Rise of the Public Schools: A Study of Boys’ Public Boarding Schools in England and Wales from 1837 to the Present Day (London: Nelson, 1967), 260–61.
32 David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 225.
33 Adams, Balfour: The Last Grandee.
34 Sydney H. Zebel, Balfour: A Political Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 260, quoted in Mackay and Matthew, “Balfour, Arthur James, First Earl of Balfour (1848–1930).”
35 Theodore Roosevelt to George H. Putnam, Dec. 5, 1918, TRP RSC.
36 “Roosevelt as a Sportsman,” Boston Daily Globe, Feb. 5, 1919, quoted in Ryan A. Swanson, “‘I Never Was a Champion at Anything’: Theodore Roosevelt's Complex and Contradictory Record as America's ‘Sports President,’” Journal of Sport History 38 (Fall 2011): 425–46.
37 On Roosevelt and college football, see Swanson, “‘I Never Was a Champion at Anything,’” 437–39. Also, John J. Miller, The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football (New York: Harper, 2012).
38 Swanson, “‘I Never Was a Champion at Anything,’” 431.
39 Much has been written about Roosevelt's “manliness,” a theme that does not need recounting here. See Gary Gerstle, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism,” Journal of American History 86 (Dec. 1999): 1280–1307.
40 Swanson, “‘I Never Was a Champion at Anything,’” 430.
41 Theodore Roosevelt to Pierre de Coubertin, June 15, 1903, in Brands, ed., Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 298.
42 Swanson, “‘I Never Was a Champion at Anything,’” 431.
43 Swanson, “‘I Never Was a Champion at Anything,’” 440.
44 The main cause for the failings in Paris and St Louis was the incorporation of the games into world's fairs, which resulted in their marginalization. de Coubertin resolved that he would never allow the Olympics to be anything other than a stand-alone event. On the 1904 games, see Charles J. P. Lucas, The Olympic Games 1904, (St. Louis: Woodward and Tiernan Printing Co., 1905) available at www.la84foundation.org/6oic/OfficialReports/1904/1904lucas.pdf (accessed July 23, 2014); George R. Matthews and Sandra Marshall, St. Louis Olympics, 1904 (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia, 2003); and George R. Matthews, America's First Olympics: The St. Louis Games of 1904 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
45 Pierre de Coubertin to Theodore Roosevelt, Dec. 23, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress, available via Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, Dickinson State University, www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record.aspx?libID=o36343 (accessed July 23, 2014).
46 Robert Barney, “Coubertin and Americans: Wary Relationships, 1889–1925” in Coubertin et l'Olympism: questions pour l'avenir (Lausanne: Comite International Pierre de Coubertin, 1998), 58, available at http://www.coubertin.ch/pdf/PDF-Dateien/112-Barney.pdf (accessed July 24, 2014).
47 James E. Sullivan, ed., Spalding's Athletic Library: Official Athletic Almanac for 1905, Olympic Games Number (New York: American Sports Publishing Co., 1905), 161, available at http://library.la84.org/6oic/OfficialReports/1904/1904Spal.pdf (accessed July 24, 2014).
48 Matthews and Marshall, St Louis Olympics, 1904, 7.
49 In St. Louis, the United States won 239 medals, 78 gold. The next highest total was Germany with 13, including 4 gold; www.olympic.org/st-louis-1904-summer-olympics (accessed July 24, 2014).
50 On the eve of the 1912 Olympics, Sullivan remarked, in language befitting the Founding Fathers on the one hand and the social Darwinists of the era on the other: “American Olympians were products of the melting pot shaped by American institutions into champions who could beat anyone from their former homelands. The American champions represented the adventuresome souls who had escaped the tyranny and repression of the Old World to participate in the great republican experiment that forged the United States.” Mark Dyreson, “Selling American Civilization: The Olympic Games of 1920 and American Culture,” OLYMPIKA: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 8 (1999): 1–42. According to Rebecca Jenkins, The First London Olympics: 1908 (London: Piatkus Books, 2008), 79, Sullivan gained a powerbase in the Amateur Athletic Union while preaching a gospel of pure amateurism: “His supporters praised him as ‘manly, straight-forward and vigorous’; his critics stigmatised him as bullying and rude. But he was a brilliant administrator and networker.” AAU secretary (1889–1906), president (1906–1909), and then secretary again until his untimely death in 1914, Sullivan can be credited with much of the initial success of the U.S. team at the Olympic Games.
51 The 1906 Olympics in Athens and their place in the history of the Olympic movement is discussed in Karl Lennartz, “The 2nd International Olympic Games in Athens 1906,” Journal of Olympic History 10 (Dec. 2001–Jan. 2002): 10–27, available at www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/JOH/JOHv10n1/JOHv10n1i.pdf (accessed July 24, 2014).
52 Roosevelt to Sullivan May 3, 1906, in James E. Sullivan, The Olympic Games at Athens, 1906 (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1906), 45. According to Sullivan, “The message was read to the athletes at a dinner at the Hermes Hotel and three long cheers were given for our athletic President. The President again showed his deep interest in the success of the team, as is shown by the following telegram which was received as soon as the team landed from the steamer Republic upon their return to New York: ‘Let me heartily congratulate you and all the members of the team upon their admirable showing. We are all proud of the record they made,’” Roosevelt to Sullivan, May 25, 1906, in Sullivan, The Olympic Games at Athens.
53 On the move of the 1908 Olympics from Rome to London, John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson, eds., Watching the Olympics: Politics, Power and Representation (London: Routledge, 2012), ch. 1.
54 Theodore Andrea Cook, The Fourth Olympiad, Being the Official Report The Olympic Games of 1908… (London: The British Olympic Association, 1909), 17, available at www.la84foundation.org/6oic/OfficialReports/1908/1908.pdf (accessed July 24, 2014).
55 Pierre de Coubertin to Austin Lee, June 30, 1893 (D1071H/B/C/624/2), and de Coubertin to Lord Dufferin, Oct. 18, 1896 (D1071H/B/C/624/3), Dufferin Papers (General Correspondence), Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast.
56 See also Norbert Müller, ed., Pierre de Coubertin 1863–1937: Olympism—Selected Writings (Lausanne: Comite International Pierre de Coubertin, 2000), 389.
57 Bulletin du Comité International, 1re. Année No. 1, Juillet 1894, in International Olympic Committee Museum/Files, Lausanne.
58 See Angela Lambert, Unquiet Souls: The Indian Summer of the British Aristocracy 1880–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1984); Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, The Souls (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984); and Jane Ridley, “Souls (act. 1886–1911),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/templates/theme.jsp?articleid=42005 (accessed July 24, 2014).
59 Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 225.
60 Lincoln Allison and Rusty MacLean, “There's a Deathless Myth on the Close Tonight: Re-assessing Rugby's Place in the History of Sport,” International Journal of the History of Sport 29 (Sept. 2012): 1866–84.
61 The United Kingdom had 146 total medals with 56 gold; the United States 47 total, 23 gold. Cook, The Fourth Olympiad.
62 Jenkins, The First London Olympics: 1908, 252.
63 Bill Mallon and Ian Buchanan, The 1908 Olympic Games: Results for All Competitors in All Events (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), append. 3.
64 As was the practice to this point, the hosts provided all of the officials drawn from the relevant, British, national sports federations. This was to change, one of the legacies of the London Games to the modern Olympic movement. Following the London Games, the IOC implemented changes that meant the hosts would not provide the officials. Henceforth, the International Sporting Federations (ISFs) would manage each of the participating sports. The games set a precedent in terms of scale and organisation, being the largest—with over 2000 athletes—and best organized to date. Moreover, the 1908 Olympics generated sufficient interest to revive the Olympic movement and steer the games toward the modern-day phenomenon that they would become. Matthews, ‘The Controversial Olympic Games of 1908,” 52, notes that the first London Games “provided the impetus to restore a sense of dignity and credibility to the Olympic movement after the ludicrous and somewhat farcical games of 1900 and 1904.”
65 The U.S. team was photographed at Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill retreat in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Aug. 31, 1908.
66 Jenkins, The First London Olympics: 1908, 251.
67 Roosevelt to Theodore A. Cook, Nov. 17, 1908, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress, reel 352, quoted in Tilchin, “Anglo-American Partnership,” 322.
68 Theodore Roosevelt to George C. Buell, Aug. 18, 1908, in Brands, Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 499.
69 New York Times, July 24, 1908, 7.
70 The Times (London), July 24, 1908, 6.
71 Jenkins, The First London Olympics: 1908, 242.
72 Sullivan quoted in ibid., 252.
73 Roosevelt to Buell, Aug. 18, 1908, in Brands, Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 496.
74 Roosevelt to Buell, Aug. 18, 1908, in Brands, Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 496.
75 Tilchin, “Anglo-American Partnership,” 322.
76 Roosevelt to Buell, Aug., 18, 1908, 497.
77 Roosevelt to Buell, Aug., 18, 1908, 498–99.
78 Jane Ridley and Clayre Percy, eds., The Letters of Arthur Balfour & Lady Elcho 1885–1917 (London: Hamish Hamilton, Ltd., 1992), 249.
79 Cook, The Fourth Olympiad, 179.
80 Ibid., 207.
81 Richard Davenport-Hines, Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008), 149.
82 Lord Sebastian Coe, Closing Ceremony, Sept. 9, 2012.
83 Less one think that “controversy” is always a negative for the Olympic Games, one might note Richard Moore, The Dirtiest Race in History (London: Wisden, 2012), which charts the 1988 Olympic men's 100m final.
84 Matthews, “The Controversial Olympic Games of 1908,” 40.
85 Wister, “Theodore Roosevelt: The Sportsman and the Man,” 248.
86 Matthews, “The Controversial Olympic Games of 1908,” 40.
87 David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937–1941: A Study in Competitive Co-Operation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).