White House History Quarterly 55 - The Presidents and Sports

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

The Presidents and Sports The Journal of T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I A T I O N Number 5 5

Please note that the following is a digitized version of a selected article from White House History Quarterly, Issue 55, originally released in print form in 2019. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.org No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

The Presidents and Sports The Journal of THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Fall 2019, Number 55

CONTRIBUTORS

the white house historical association Board of Directors

chairman

mary jo binker is the author of If You Ask Me: Essential Advice from Eleanor Roosevelt and What Are We For? The Words and Ideals of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Frederick J. Ryan Jr.

vice chairman and treasurer John F. W. Rogers

secretary James I. McDaniel

president Stewart D. McLaurin

al freni is a photographer based in New York City. He is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force.

John T. Behrendt, Michael Beschloss, Teresa Carlson, Jean Case, Cathy Gorn, Janet A. Howard, Knight Kiplinger, Martha Joynt Kumar, Anita McBride, Mike McCurry, Robert M. McGee, Ann Stock, Ben C. Sutton Jr., Tina Tchen, Greg Wendt

frederic j. frommer leads the Dewey Square Group’s Sports PR Practice.

He has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, POLITICO Magazine, and The Atlantic. His books on sports include You Gotta Have Heart, a history of Washington baseball.

ex officio Lonnie Bunch III, David S. Ferriero, Carla Hayden, Tom Mayes, Kaywin Feldman

directors emeriti John H. Dalton, Nancy M. Folger, Elise K. Kirk, Harry G. Robinson III, Gail Berry West LIAISON David Vela

white house history quarterly editor William Seale

mac keith griswold is a journalist and cultural landscape historian and author of a forthcoming book on the life of Bunny Mellon. She is an editorial adviser to White House History Quarterly.

vice president of publishing and executive editor Marcia Mallet Anderson

editorial and production director Lauren McGwin

senior editorial and production manager Kristen A. Hunter

editorial and production manager Elyse Werling

editorial assistant Rebecca Durgin

consulting editor Ann Hofstra Grogg

consulting design Pentagram

editorial advisory Mac Keith Griswold Scott Harris Anthony Pitch (1939–2019) Lydia Barker Tederick

david ramsey is a corporate interior designer who specializes in commercial, educational, and historic preservation interiors. matthew schaefer is an archivist at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa.

the editor wishes to thank The Office of the Curator, The White House

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CONTENTS

A 1904 political cartoon depicts “Terrible Teddy” Roosevelt as a boxer awaiting a challenger to occupy the empty chair in the “Democratic Corner” opposite him. Boxing was one of many sports pursued by Roosevelt during his presidency.

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FOREWORD

william seale

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THE PRESIDENTS AND BASEBALL Presidential Openers and Other Traditions frederic j. frommer

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ULYSSES S. GRANT’S WHITE HOUSE BILLIARD SALOON

david ramsey

THEODORE ROOSEVELT: The President Who Saved Football mary jo binker

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HOOVER BALL AND WELLNESS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

matthew schaefer

ALAMY

w i lli am seale

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THE FIRST FAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE Iconic Moments with America’s Champions stewart d. m c laurin

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THE LONG SHADOW OF JIUJITSU IN THE EAST ROOM President Theodore Roosevelt Practices Self-Defense

CAPTURING A MOMENT IN TIME Remembering My Summer Photographing President Eisenhower

PRESIDENTIAL SITE FEATURE FromWashington the files of the National The Riding and Sporting Library: The Hunt Club at Washington the NationalRiding and HuntLibrary Club and itsMuseum Presidential Sporting and Connections mac keith griswold mac keith griswold

94 94 REFLECTIONS:

REFLECTIONS: WILLIAM SEALE: My White House Founding EditorHistory Hero stewart d. m c laurin

al freni

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FOREWORD

KEEPING IN SHAPE AT THE WHITE HOUSE

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golf; Woodrow Wilson played only because his doctor Cary Grayson insisted. Donald Trump and Barack Obama both love golf, and while Trump gives it every effort, Obama seemed to prefer basketball. And presidents have long paid attention to spectator sports, too, first to baseball, then to football—specially favored

by Theodore Roosevelt, as this issue reveals.

Winning teams and heroes in all kinds of competitions are now honored by invitations to the White House.

Sports at the White House are an ongoing subject for White House History Quarterly.

This issue looks not only at the sports personally pursued by the presidents but the national pastimes they share in celebrating with the American people.

william seale editor, WHITE HOUSE HISTORY QUARTERLY

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D AV I D H U M E K E N N E R LY/ G E T T Y I M A G E S

Athletics, even as mere exercise, has been a major feature of White House life from the start.

Early presidents walked far more outside than is possible today, given the reality of twentyfirst-century security. One can easily imagine the otherwise ceremonial East Room (85 by 40 feet) as a private place for walking—considered in the early days, as now, the best exercise. The “long galleries” of other grand houses of the early nineteenth century were also meant for indoor exercise as well as ceremony.

We have no evidence of athletics on the part of John Adams other than the occasional boasting about his physical prowess. Thomas Jefferson was a fine horseman and devoted pedestrian on Pennsylvania Avenue, which he improved for the purpose with shade trees.

All manner of sports have appealed to the nation’s chief executives to break the physical monotony of presidential life laid before them.

Ulysses S. Grant played billiards, Theodore Roosevelt took up jujitsu, and Herbert Hoover inspired Hoover Ball, a complicated and strenuous game, somewhat obscure yet still played today. Fishing and golf have been a primary distractions for many, including Dwight D. Eisenhower. William Howard Taft also loved

The press captures each stroke as President Gerald R. Ford enjoys his first of what would become almost daily swims in the new White House pool, just outside the Oval Office, August 5, 1975.

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The Presidents and BASEBALL Presidential Openers and Other Traditions

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P O R T R A I T : C O U R T E S Y M A R Y FA I R FA X K I R K P I C K L E

NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM

fred eric j. fro mmer

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the pitcher’s mound, for most of the twentieth century they tossed the ball from the stands, over a scrum of photographers onto the field into a crowd of players from both teams, who would battle for it, with the winning player getting an autograph from the chief executive.

When Taft made his opening-day pitch in 1910, baseball was the only team sport that mattered in the United States. Football has since eclipsed it as the nation’s most popular sport, but nothing matches baseball’s hold on American culture. A hundred years later, President Barack Obama marked the anniversary in 2010 with a high, wide toss at Nationals Park.

Baseball’s relationship with the White House went back to even before

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President Harry S. Truman completes his throw to open the September 8, 1945, game between the Washington Senators and the St. Louis Browns, who were from Truman’s home state of Missouri. above

President William Howard Taft throws out the first ball to open a Washington Senators baseball game at Bennett Park in Detroit on June 9, 1910. In April that same year Taft threw the first pitch at the first home game of the Washington team. opposite

President Taft passes the Senators’ dugout ahead of the August 13, 1912, game. The sinking of the Titanic in April of that year had prevented Taft from making the first toss at the season opener. Almost a century later, President Barack Obama throws the opening pitch at Nationals Park.

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f o r m o r e t h a n a c e n t u r y , the relationship between presidents and the national pastime has been wound as tightly as a new baseball. Most fans are familiar with the ceremonial first pitch, which was a longtime Washington tradition, even with a thirty-three-year absence. But presidents have played other, more substantive roles, working behind the scenes to keep the sport going during wartime and even trying to find a new team for Washington, D.C. From William Howard Taft to Richard Nixon, every president made at least one opening-day toss in Washington, which usually started its season a day early in what was known as the presidential opener. Congress recessed for the afternoon so members could attend. And unlike today, when presidents throw from

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TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS BOTTOM: PETE SOUZA, WHITE HOUSE PHOTO

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government clerks out of work early so they could attend, too.

At the dawn of the new century, unfortunately, baseball did not have a fan in the Oval Office. Theodore Roosevelt, who became president in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, mocked the sport as a “mollycoddle game,” meaning pampered or overprotected. Apparently, baseball did not measure up to the Rough Rider’s ideal of a real man’s sport. That did not stop a delegation from the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues in 1907 from presenting Roosevelt with a season pass, made of solid 14K gold, to “recognize your practical support of a game that nourishes

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no ‘mollycoddles.’”1 No hard feelings!

Roosevelt’s protégé-turned-adversary, Taft, had a more favorable view of the sport and will always be etched in baseball history as the first president to throw out the first pitch. On a mild April afternoon in 1910, he made a low throw that Washington Senators Hallof-Fame pitcher Walter Johnson saved from an embarrassing bounce in the dirt. Less remembered is that Taft might have unwittingly cost Johnson a no-hitter. In the seventh inning, the Athletics’ Frank Baker hit a fly fall off Johnson in the direction of Washington outfielder Doc Gessler. But Gessler, as he admitted later, had been daydreaming of hitting a grand slam and talking to the president

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Taft’s toss. In a sign of how the sport had already become an important institution, a November 1860 editorial cartoon depicted the nation’s most consequential presidential election on a baseball diamond. The cartoon, by lithographers Currier & Ives, is titled “The National Game. Three ‘Outs’ and One ‘Run.’” Each candidate holds a bat featuring his political stance: “fusion,” “non-intervention,” “slavery extension,” and, in Abraham Lincoln’s case, “equal rights and free territory.” The president-elect is standing on home plate.

Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, attended a baseball tournament at the Ellipse in the summer of 1865, along with 6,000 other fans. He even let

opposite

President-elect Abraham Lincoln advises his opponents while standing on home plate in an 1860 editorial cartoon. The sport had become a national institution by this time. below

President Woodrow Wilson threw out the first ball for the Washington Senators’ opening day games on both April 14, 1915, and April 20, 1916, with Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, at his side each time. The Senators beat the New York Yankees in each match.

about it. He wound up tripping over a fan—spectators could stand on the field behind a rope back then—and the ball fell in for the only hit against Johnson that day.

That presidential pitch might have ended up a one-off if not for the marketing savvy two years later of Washington’s new manager and part-owner, Clark Griffith. Recalling his thinking years later, Griffith wrote, “It occurred to me that this would be a fine annual custom. So I requested a meeting with him [Taft], and he received me very amiably. ‘I’d like to establish this as an annual function,’ I told him, ‘and if you would cooperate it might catch on.’” “Why sure, Griff. I’ll be glad to start the ball rolling,” Taft replied.2 The president had already missed opening day that year because of the sinking of the Titanic, but he came out two months later to resume the tradition.

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Woodrow Wilson made several opening-day tosses and was such a big baseball fan that he kept a “dugout” at the White House, where he read and talked baseball. But Wilson’s most interesting connection to the sport happened after he left office. He had suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed while still president, and after his presidency, he asked Griffith about coming to games. Griffith was worried about how to accommodate him. As he recalled: Finally, I got an idea. I phoned the president of the American League and asked him for permission to have Mr. Wilson’s automobile driven onto the field and parked outside the right-field foul line.

“Well,” he said, “that might interfere with the right fielder, but if the umpires will sanction it, it’s all right with me.” I got in touch with

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the umpires, and they gave me permission. Mr. Wilson’s car was parked between the foul line and the seats, and I stationed a player out there to sit on the bumper of the car and ward off any foul balls that might be headed for the automobile.3

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Unlike Wilson, President Calvin Coolidge was not that big of a baseball fan. That distinction belonged to his wife, Grace. But Silent Cal had the distinction of being the only president to witness a World Series championship in Washington. After the Senators clinched the 1924 pennant—their first in history—Coolidge hosted the team, telling the players, “By bringing the baseball pennant to Washington you have made the National Capital more truly the center of worthy and honorable national aspirations.” The president

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above

On April 14, 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tossed the first ball to start the baseball season for the Washington Senators and the New York Yankees. opposite

On September 5, 1924, the Washington Senators visited President Calvin Coolidge at the White House, where they posed for a group shot, and the president signed a baseball.

presented player-manager Bucky Harris with a “loving cup” as a gift and joked about how the Senators had taken hold of the city that season: “When the entire population reached the point of requiring the game to be described playby-play, I began to doubt whether the highest efficiency was being promoted.”4 Coolidge threw out the first pitch at the World Series opener, but it was his wife who kept score.

Seven years later President Herbert Hoover attended another World Series game, but in much less happy circumstances. This Depression-era game was in Philadelphia, where the A’s were hosting the St. Louis Cardinals, and fans were in a sour mood over Prohibition.

The notorious Philadelphia fans chanted “We Want Beer!” “I left the ball park with the chant of the crowd ringing in my ears: ‘We want beer!’” Hoover wrote in his memoirs.5 Hoover’s successor, Franklin D. white house history quarterly

Roosevelt, threw out a record eight opening-day pitches. Once again, a president indirectly affected action on the field. At the 1936 opener, Senators pitcher Bobo Newsom and third baseman Ossie Bluege converged on a bunt.

While Bluege fielded it, the pitcher looked away from the ball to glance at FDR, and his third baseman nailed him in the face with the throw. Newsom suffered a broken jaw but still managed to throw a four-hit shutout. The next day, the Washington Post ran a piece mocking the president’s Secret Service detail: A group of grim-lipped, steel-eyed huskies, all wearing their right hands in their pockets with the nonchalance of long practice, slither past the Washington dugout to the president’s box. . . . The Secret Service men are as taut as greyhounds in the starting box. A reporter reaches in his pocket for

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The next year, FDR became the first president to attend an All-Star Game—only the fifth one in history— in July 1937, as Congress was debating his ill-fated plan to pack the Supreme Court with extra justices. Despite the typically hot and sticky Washington weather, Roosevelt found relief from the political heat at the ballpark, where he won campaign-style adoration that afternoon. He waved his hat to cheering fans as his convertible made its way down the field, past a procession of lined up players. A recently discovered film captures this moment, along with rare footage of FDR walking—with assistance—to his seat. FDR also threw out the first pitch that afternoon. “If I didn’t have to hobble up those steps in front of all these people, I’d be out at the ballpark every day,” he once told Griffith, the Senators’ owner.7 In 1940, as he ran for an unprecedented third term, Roosevelt was not on top of his game on opening day. His first pitch hit a Washington Post photographer’s camera. FDR had a much greater impact on the sport, however, a couple of years later. After the United States entered World War II, Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote the president asking whether the sport should continue. “If you believe we ought to close down for the duration of the war, we are ready to do so immediately,” Landis wrote. “If you feel we ought to continue, we would be delighted to do so. We await your order.” In what became known as the “Green Light Letter,” Roosevelt responded that it would be best for the country if

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baseball continued: “There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.”8 During World War II the presidential opening-day tradition was suspended, but FDR’s successor Harry S. Truman made a point of throwing out the first pitch on September 8, 1945, just six days after Japan’s surrender was formalized aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo

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The 1937 All-Star Game program cover featured a happy President Franklin D. Roosevelt preparing to throw the opening pitch. opposite

With what became known as the “Green Light Letter,” President Roosevelt expressed his personal opinion that baseball should continue during World War II and he calculated the number of people for whom it would provide a welcome break from long work days. The original letter is preserved in the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

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a cigarette, and his hand is jerked away before he can get it. . . . Finally the presidential heave takes place, and there ensues the maddest scramble you ever saw for the ball.

Ball players, news photographers, cameramen, reporters, and a few civilians pile up like sandlot football players.6

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When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing, and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real Major League Baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he’d like to be president of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.10

the Washington team upon his father Clark Griffith’s death a few years before.

In a telegram, Truman told the team’s owner: “BEST OF LUCK TO YOU ON OPENING DAY AND EVERY DAY. WATCH OUT FOR THAT NIXON. DON’T LET HIM THROW YOU A CURVE. YOUR FRIEND, HARRY TRUMAN.”12 Later that season, Nixon traveled to the Soviet Union for the famous “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Back home, the woeful Senators were playing even worse than normal, losing a dozen games in a row. At the ballpark, one of Nixon’s favorite players, Washington slugger Roy Sievers, received a call. It was Nixon on the line, from the Soviet Union. “I want Lemon, Killebrew, Allison, and Sievers out at the airport when the plane lands,” Nixon demanded, instructing Sievers to bring his teammates Jim Lemon, Harmon Killebrew, and Bob Allison. “We were all there,” Sievers recalled.

The first thing he said was, “What in the hell is wrong with the Senators?” And I said, “Mr. Vice

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Eisenhower angered some baseball fans his first year as president, 1953, when he decided to go golfing in

Augusta, Georgia, rather than throw out the opening-day toss. He got a mulligan—on the baseball game, not the golf outing—when the Senators’ game was rained out, so he flew back and threw out the opening-day toss on the rescheduled opener. He stayed for just one and one-half innings before flying back to his golfing trip.

Three years later, the All-Star Game came back to Washington, but this time there was no presidential first pitch, as Eisenhower was recovering from surgery. But he did announce that same day he was running for reelection. Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich panned the president’s timing, writing, “The first error of the 1956 All-Star festivities is committed by Mr. Eisenhower. On a day when the nation is baseball minded, Ike’s announcement that he will stand for reelection could wind up among the Sally League results,” a nickname for a low-level minor league.11 In 1959 Vice President Richard Nixon subbed for Eisenhower, and Truman sent a humorous warning to Calvin Griffith, who had taken over

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Bay. Appearing in a suit and Panama hat at a Saturday afternoon game between the Senators and his home-state St. Louis Browns, Truman served to signal to Americans that things were back to normal. The crowd gave the president a huge ovation, and players from both teams lined up in front of him, caps over their chests.

A southpaw, Truman in 1950 threw two ceremonial pitches, one from each hand, but the right-handed one was a dud. And things got even worse for him the following season. The day before the Senators 1951 home opener, General Douglas MacArthur, whom Truman had fired as Far East commander, gave a speech to a joint session of Congress, including his famous line, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

With that as the backdrop, angry fans booed Truman at the ballpark. The U.S. Air Force Band played “Ruffles and Flourishes” and “Hail to the Chief ” in an attempt to drown out the hecklers.9 President Dwight D. Eisenhower was an aspiring ballplayer before his career in the military and politics. Before attending West Point, he played baseball for money but used the pseudonym “Wilson,” to avoid jeopardizing his amateur status to play at West Point. He wound up getting cut from the varsity baseball team. He once reminisced:

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President Harry Truman shakes hands with a fan at the September 8, 1945, Washington Senators game. above

While taking a short break from a golf trip in Augusta, Georgia, President Dwight D. Eisenhower tosses out the first pitch at the Washington Senators–New York Yankees game, April 16, 1953, as two future presidents, Senator Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, look on from behind him. right

Substituting for President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon throws the first pitch to open the 1959 baseball season. Beside him is young David Eisenhower, the president’s grandson.

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President, we’re just not hitting good, the pitching’s not good.” He said, “I tell you what, I’ll be out the next night.” Usually, when he’d come out, we’d win the ballgame.

But we lost.13

rain storm led to a postponement.

Nixon had to leave for a world trip, so Vice President Spiro Agnew filled in for him the next day. But the president still had baseball on his mind. Later that week, the Apollo astronauts returned to Earth from the Moon, and Nixon greeted them following their splashdown in the Pacific. “Incidentally, have you been able to follow some of the things that happened when you’ve gone. Did you know about the All-Star game?” Nixon asked. Neil Armstrong replied they had, and were sorry to hear that Nixon had to miss it.16 Two years later, the new Senators announced they would be leaving town, too, and this time there was no replacement team to take their place.

But Nixon worked behind the scenes to try to find a new franchise for the nation’s capital. On October 13, 1971, two weeks after the Senators played their final game in Washington, the president had a meeting with Mayor Walter E. Washington about finding a new team

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above

On April 10, 1961, President John F. Kennedy throws the first ball of the season from the stands at Griffith Stadium, home of the Washington Senators, as Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson looks on. opposite

President George W. Bush throws the ceremonial first pitch on the Nationals opening day in 2005. The occasion marked baseball’s return to Washington, D.C., after a thirty-three-year absence.

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The streak hit eighteen before the Senators finally won a game.

By the time John F. Kennedy became president, the Senators had left town, to become the Minnesota Twins.

A new Washington team, also called the Senators, started play in JFK’s first year in office, 1961, which was also the last year of Griffith Stadium. The young president threw out the first pitch that year, and again the following season, in brand-new D.C. Stadium, which would be named for his slain brother at the end of the decade.

Two Senators players, Jim Hannan and Jimmy Piersall, were driving to the stadium that day when Piersall’s car broke down in front of the White House.

They left it there and took a cab to the ballpark. Hannan described the car as something like a “37 Chevy”—old even for back then. After the game, the White House placed a call to Piersall. “And Kennedy gets on and says, ‘What are you doing leaving that piece of junk in front of my house?’” Hannan recalled.14 But the president was just giving him a hard time: the two men knew each other from Kennedy’s days as a senator from Massachusetts, when Piersall played for the Boston Red Sox. Nixon was probably the most knowledgeable baseball fan of any president.

In his first year in office, 1969, he hosted a reception of All-Stars, Hall-of-Famers, umpires, and sportswriters, where he made this rather surprising admissions: “I just want you to know that I like the job I have, but if I had to live my life over again, I would have liked to have ended up as a sportswriter.”15 That evening, Nixon had been scheduled to throw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game in Washington, but a monstrous

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for the city. Nixon suggested two possible relocation candidates—the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians.

In a tape-recorded conversation, Nixon said, “The White Sox is a possibility.

Chicago really can’t support two teams.”

Then discussing the Indians, he said, “Cleveland is not going to support them.

They got that lousy lake front stadium.”

As the meeting ended, the president said Washington would have a new team by 1976: “I think that with Washington, the [bi]centennial coming up and everything, baseball will be back.”17 But he was off by nearly three decades; baseball did not return until 2005.

In between, presidents would sometimes travel to Baltimore or other cities to make the opening-day toss, but those visits seemed like placeholders until Washington got a new team.

When it did, perhaps it was fitting that President George W. Bush, a onetime owner of the Texas Rangers—the team that had left Washington back in 1971— was there for the ceremonial first pitch

at the Nationals home opener at RFK Stadium. That afternoon, he told the American Society of News Editors: “I’ve got a decision to make. Do I go with the fastball or a slider?”18 NOTES 1.

William B. Mead and Paul Dickson, Baseball: The Presidents’ Game (New York: Walker, 1997), 17.

2. Quoted in Clark Griffith, “Presidents Who Have Pitched for Me,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1955, J7.

3. Ibid.

4. Calvin Coolidge, “Address at the Zero Milestone Welcoming Home the Washington Senators Baseball Team,” October 1, 1924, online at the American Presidency Project, https://www. presidency.ucsb.edu.

5. Quoted in Benjamin Freed, “Trump Isn’t Throwing Out the First Pitch at Nationals Park.

Thank Goodness,” Washingtonian, March 28, 2017, online at https://www.washingtonian.com.

6. Bill McCormick, “Wandering Reporter and Secret Service Men Scan Big Crowd,” Washington Post, April 15, 1936, 21.

7. Quoted in Maryann Hudson, “Decades of Bipartisan Support: Nixon’s Yorba Linda Exhibit Explores Long Love Affair Between Presidents and Baseball,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1992, C6.

8. Both letters are quoted in “President Roosevelt Gives ‘Green Light’ to Baseball,” National Baseball Hall of Fame website, https://

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baseballhall.org. Roosevelt’s letter is dated January 15, 1942.

9. Murrey Marder, “Truman Draws Boos at Nat’s Opener,” Washington Post, April 21, 1951, 1.

10. Quoted in Carl M. Cannon, “At the White House, Baseball Holds a Place of Honor,” Baltimore Sun, April 3, 1993.

11. Shirley Povich, “This Morning,” Washington Post, July 11, 1956, 27.

12. Quoted in Curt Smith, The Presidents and the Pastime: The History of Baseball and the White House (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 30.

13. Roy Sievers, interview by author, April 2005, in Frederic J. Frommer, You Gotta Have Heart (Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2013), 73.

14. Jim Hannan, interview by author, April 2005, in ibid., 72.

15. Richard Nixon, “Remarks at the Baseball All-Star Reception,” July 22, 1969, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1999), 539.

16. “Apollo 11, Day 9: Re-entry and Splashdown,” Apollo Flight Journal, National Aeronautics and Space Administration website, https://history. nasa.gov.

17. White House Tapes of the Nixon Administration, President Nixon in Oval Office with Stephen B. Bull, Walter E. Washington, Jerry V. Wilson, John D. Ehrlichman, and Egil G. “Bud” Krogh Jr., October 13, 1971. National Archives, College Park, Md. 18. Quoted in James G. Lakely, “Bush Throws Initial Pitch,” Washington Times, April 15, 2005, A14.

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Ulysses S. Grant’s WHITE HOUSE Billiard Saloon

D AV I D R A M S E Y

DAVID RAMSEY

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House, despite great criticism from politicians and the press. At the time, the games of pool and billiards had unsavory connotations to the general public, implying pool halls, gambling, drinking, and other avenues of vice, and Adams carefully avoided calling notice to game tables in the White House. President Abraham Lincoln was known to be somewhat of a pool shark and practiced on a Brunswick table purchased in 1850.2 The sport of billiards relieved presidents and their families from the pressures of the presidency when few other outlets existed. The difference between President Grant’s billiard room and the interest in billiards of earlier presidents is that Congress appropriated funds to renovate and build a new space onto the White House for the sport. Grant owned a magnificent billiard table and desired a properly sized room on the State Floor to indulge in the sport, either alone or with his numerous military comrades. By the 1860s table games such as billiards had shed earlier, unsavory associations, and the public was more accepting of a billiard room in a now very public space.

The billiard table President Grant brought to the White House had been manufactured for him in the spring of 1867, when he was the commanding general of the United States Army, by the renowned firm of Phelan & Collender in New York

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This illustration of President Ulysses S. Grant’s custom Phelan & Collender billiard table in the White House Billiard Saloon was made by the author using reports from the time, to illustrate how the room most likely appeared.

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to say that president ulysses s. grant was an avid billiard player would be an understatement; his playing bordered on an addiction. Although many presidents were known to indulge in the sport, no other president is himself synonymous with the game. In fact, he loved the sport so much that in the 1850s he and a group of fellow officers rented space in a San Francisco hotel to run a billiard club.

This venture proved unsuccessful, but it did not diminish the future president’s passion for the game.1 It is well known that a billiard room once occupied what is today the Map Room in the White House, but perhaps less known is the story of a custom table and the location specially designed for it. In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant brought a spectacular billiard table to a new and impressive room built just for billiards that he added to the White House, and during the eight years the Grants occupied the White House, and it was enjoyed by many a famous player.

Other presidents who admired the sport left their marks on the White House. President James Monroe is said to have installed a billiard table within the private quarters. President John Quincy Adams was the first president known to have personally purchased a billiard table for the White

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MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

above and opposite

President Grant ordered his billiard table in 1867 from the Phelan & Collender Billiard Table Manufactory in New York (above). Michael Phelan owned a series of pool halls including one on Broadway in New York (opposite) and one on the West Coast that had been frequented by Grant in the 1850s.

City. Grant originally placed an order for one of the company’s less expensive standard models.

However, when Michael Phelan realized the order was for General Grant, the table was upgraded to one with additional ornament and carvings. The company was proud of this table and displayed it in the New York showroom prior to its delivery to the Grant home.

Michael Phelan was the most famous billiard player of the mid-nineteenth century, and he had owned a series of pool halls on the West Coast at the time Grant was stationed there in the army.

Grant was an avid spectator of the nightly games at Phalen’s Metropolitan Billiard Room in San Francisco. One of Phelan’s relatives later reported that in 1854 nearly every afternoon or night [Grant] would sit as nearly as possible in the same place, smoking a cigar and watching Michael Phelan discounting such players as James Cook, William Thompson, Dan Lynch, Frankie Lawson, Joseph W. Little and others. General Grant was a most patient and interested spectator but played only when few

persons were in the room. He could play a fair game. Once he remarked about his game: “I believe I am even a poorer billiard player than I am a soldier.”

In 1867 Michael Phelan, then a member of the manufacturing firm of Phelan and Collender, was standing in their wareroom in New York when a military-looking man walked in and said to him: “How are you, Mr. Phelan; I don’t suppose you remember me?”

Phelan, who could not remember names, said: “Well, I remember your face but cannot call you by name.” General Grant added: “I am not surprised, it is 13 years since I met you and that was in San Francisco where I used to see you play billiards, and I shall never forget the night you ran those three games out on Thompson. I was then Captain Grant but now they call me General Grant.”

General Grant said he had lost none of his love for billiards but that he had not had much chance to see any playing for some years and that he was thinking about getting a billiard table for his house in Washington. Soon after a splendid table made especially was shipped to

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A view of the Grant Billiard Room looking toward the northwest through to the Conservatory beyond. President Grant’s custom Phelan & Collender billiard table resides under opaque glass in order to protect it from the southern exposure.

General U. S. Grant, Washington, and Michael Phelan went soon after to see it was set up properly and to play the first game on it with the next presidemt of the United States.3 The New York Times reported of Grant’s new billiard table: The material portions of the table are like those of all others of this manufacture, but in elegance of ornamentation we presume this has never been approached. The case is of solid blistered and highly polished black walnut; at the joints are plates of gold; at the corners, gilded, are the arms of the United States; on the sides, the General’s monogram; and at the ends a gold plate with the patent and other formal inscriptions. The carom pattern is the style, and the size the regulation of 5½ x 11 feet.

The appointments of the table are choice and tasteful. The pockets are of silk netting, the cues white ash inlaid with black walnut, the legs beautifully turned and ornamented like the body. Grant used to play at Phelan’s saloon in San Francisco, and though now by no means a brilliant operator, handles his cue very nicely for an amateur. The cost of the table is in the neighborhood of $1,400, and is, we believe, a present from the firm of whom Gen. Grant ordered a plainer and less expensive one.4 A telegram on May 22, 1867, notes that the table was delivered at 9:45 a.m. to the Grant home at 205 I Street NW, Washington, D.C.5 Then, following his election as president and his move to the White House, Grant wrote to his good friend Lieutenant General William T. Sherman concerning the sale of this home and its contents: If the purchase is made the house will have in it substantially every thing for housekeeping except bedding, silver ware and perhaps table ware. The pictures, library, mantle [sic] ornaments and some little articles will not be left. There is a billiard table & piano too which I shall reserve but probably will leave in the house so long as I remain in Washington.6 Grant, a frequent visitor to the White House during the Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson administrations, likely assumed either that there was a billiard table within the Executive Residence or that he would acquire another one after his

inauguration. By late October 1869, however, the Phelan & Collender table was dismantled from Grant’s I Street home and installed prominently within the first White House space created for the express purpose of billiards. Joseph Martin, one of the expert workmen of Phelan & Collender, supervised the relocation of the table to the “National Billiard Saloon.”7 Earlier that year the Grants had moved into the White House with much fanfare and high spirits.

The gloom of the war years was beginning to fade, and a period of energy and optimism ushered in a presidential family that drew much attention for its youth and vitality. Echoing the country’s Reconstruction, a similar campaign of sorts began at the White House. Early plans included a newly configured Grand Staircase, refinements to the State Rooms begun by Martha Patterson, President Andrew Johnson’s daughter, costly new rugs for all the State Rooms, new office furnishings, the redecoration of most of the Second Floor rooms, a major redecoration of the Oval Library, and work on the Conservatory roof and furnace.8 Exact materials purchased for the new Billiard Room are difficult to ascertain within the records, but there are several line-items of wood materials from various species and finish for structure, finished floors, wall structure, wall cladding, and ceilings that differ from what was required to build the new Grand Staircase. These materials are noted throughout the entirety of the summer of 1869. From this listing, one can deduce a space outfitted in prime mahogany, narrow tongue-andgroove ash, walnut molding, oak, spruce, hickory, white pine beaded ceilings, yellow pine, white pine, “Carolina” ash and walnut flooring, and heavy walnut framing. Also listed are boxes of various size panes of glass, both clear and grained, more than likely required to replace broken panes within the existing Conservatory and to outfit new windows.

What can be envisioned is a room clad in various species of wood, heavily molded, and characterized by narrow beading. By October 1869, the listings include new flooring, banisters and “2 large balls” for the access stair both to and from the Residence.9 Also of note, there is only one mention of the “Billiard Room” within the totality of the records, in November 9, 1869, where an entry states “repairing Sofa & Billiard Room chair.”10 One could conclude either that the Billiard Room space was thought

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A Billiard-Room at the White House During the absence of the President an elegant billiard room has been constructed for his use between the Conservatory and main building, upon the right of the passage leading to the Conservatory. The room is handsomely fitted up and wainscoated [sic] with narrow strips of walnut and North Carolina pine. It is about twenty feet square, affording ample room for a large table. The billiard room is accessible from the private part of the house only, being reached by the passage on the second floor between the State and private dining room.11 The American Tuileries Just off the State Dining-room, and back of the passage leading to the conservatory, has been erected a small addition to the mansion for the diversion of the President. This is the Executive billiard-saloon. It is about eighteen by twentyfive feet in dimensions, nearly all enclosed with glass, the narrow spaces between the windows being filled with pictures of a sporting character. The furniture is of black walnut,and

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consists merely of a few chairs, a table, a side-board, &c. The room is prettily carpeted, and contains a single table of Phelan’s make, finished in rosewood in the most elaborate style.

The cues are mostly of costly wood, inlaid with pearl. Everything in the apartment is of the best, and certainly it is an attractive spot. The table was selected by General Grant in person at Phelan’s establishment in this city, and was in use at his private residence before he was elected President. We leave the subject to the consideration of the ill-paid working people, the honest farmers. And the sincere republicans of the country.12 Less enthusiastic articles ended with even more disparaging comments. “Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and the millionaires of Government can dance and play while the toiling masses supply the treasury.”13 Although no architectural drawings are known to exist of the Billiard Room, various clues to its configuration can be discovered by studying drawings of the older 1857 James Buchanan Conservatory prototype, the reconstructed 1867 Andrew Johnson Conservatory, and the later 1880 Rutherford B. Hayes Conservatory modifications.

Numerous contemporary stereo views of the White House at the White House Historical Association and the Library of Congress also yield clues to the Billiard Room’s appearance and contents.14 The Conservatory was extensively upgraded after the Grants left the White House, late in the Hayes administration. One portion of this upgrade called for the removal of the Billiard Room and, in its place, the construction of a much taller and wider “Palm Court.” This new space was documented in plan and section drawings. Overlaying drawings depicting the old volume and the new volume reveal

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The South Front of the White House in 1858 showing the Conservatory and the connecting space (circled) that would later be occupied by Grant’s Billiard Room. opposite

A view of the Grant Billiard Room looking east from inside the Conservatory.

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of as a continuation of the Conservatory repairs and the new Grand Staircase construction project or that the materials were seamlessly threaded through the entries so as not to draw attention to the new room. If the latter is true, the “secret room” did not remain a secret for much longer. Numerous newspaper articles from the fall of 1869 through the winter of 1870 describe the many changes to the White House for the Grant family. All of them mention the Billiard Room, and, as can be expected, not all the attention was necessarily flattering:

least amount of conversion of the Conservatory to a new interior space.

It is interesting that the stereo views from the 1860s to 1880, when the Hayes Conservatory addition replaced the Billiard Room, never depict a space higher than the old glass connector that ran east-west from the Grand Stair Hall to the main, taller, Conservatory. Stereo views of the new North Fountain, installed during the Grant administration, show a space lower than the higher roof peak of the main Conservatory. Noting this at the time of the Grant North Lawn fountain installation, which occurred after the installation of the Billiard Room,

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that the floor level of the Billiard Room was a few steps above the State Floor of the White House and below the level of the older main Conservatory.

The width of the Conservatory in the north-south direction is approximately 25 feet. The proposed Conservatory drawings from the 1850s depict a glass corridor approximately 25 feet long that connected the State Floor to the main Conservatory in the east-west direction. The space left over adjacent to the outside of the State Dining Room was the logical location for the Grant Billiard Room. By positioning the Billiard Room in this location, the existing outdoor space would have required the

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sold the table prior to his death, given the family’s financial strife. Regardless, the table is not in the Grant family’s possession.18 A new billiard table and equipment were installed in the Ground Floor space for President James A. Garfield in 1881.19 The Billiard Room remained in this location until the Franklin Roosevelt administration, when the space was converted to the Map Room during World War II. The standard source on the history of the White House describes the Grant Billiard Room this way: Exactly what this room looked like is difficult to determine, as none of it survives either in artifacts or in pictures. According to building records, its components were in the modern English “reform” style, which featured exposed carpentry and rustic effects. This was the antithesis of the dressy “French” interior decoration that had dominated the White House since its reconstruction after the War of 1812. Michler’s papers indicate that the billiard

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View of the Billiard Room from the Conservatory looking northeast.

The pillars between the windows were filled with “pictures of a sporting character.” A stove is located in the southeast corner with a flue that ties directly into the chimney of the State Dining Room beyond. The seating area for guests is seen on the left.

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proves that the highest point of the Billiard Room most likely aligned with the series of joists shown on the section drawing of the new Conservatory.

Given these parameters, the size of the new Billiard Room was approximately 25 feet long by 25 feet wide by 15 feet high. The slope of the ceiling from the north section of the glass passage was most likely retained and simply mirrored on the south side. These parameters would have resulted in an exterior view of the room built sight unseen from the public from the north and most likely from the south. From the south, all the known stereo views from this period show a large tree blocking the view of the room from the South Lawn.

The Billiard Room lasted throughout the Grant administration and early into the Hayes administration. When the Hayes family moved into the White House in March 1877, the Billiard Room volume was retained but the billiard table was moved to the basement for the family did not approve of billiards.15 The old Billiard Room space was converted to a promenade that proved popular with the Hayes family for after-dinner entertaining. It also served as a space where the guests would gather before touring the tropical Conservatory. One of the few marks the Hayeses left on the White House was the conversion of the Grant space into this new, enlarged “Palm Court,” which opened directly off the State Dining Room from new French door openings cut through the West Front of the White House to either side of the fireplace. This new space allowed easy access to the Conservatory and provided exotic views into the Conservatory during long, “dry”’ State Dinners.16 If the fate of the Grant Billiard Room is one chapter in the history of the White House, the fate of the Grant billiard table is less clear. One might assume that it was the Grant table that was moved to the Ground Floor by the Hayeses because it is doubtful they would have purchased a new one. In 1880, at the end of the Hayes administration, newspapers reported, “Mrs. Hayes has kept the White House billiard table in the cellar during her occupancy of the Presidential mansion. As General Garfield is a thorough lover of the game he will probably restore the table to the old place.”17 No records exist of the table following the Grants on their travels after the presidency. It is possible that after eight years adjacent to a hot and humid Conservatory environment the table may have been damaged. It is also possible that Grant

room was rich in natural wood finishes.

Walnut, spruce, oak, and mahogany were used in paneling, wainscoting, and the decorative “timber framing” that gave a massive great-hall effect. Some of the timbers were carved. Iron and plaster surfaces were made to look like wood by staining and paint-graining. The ceiling was not glass, like that in the adjacent greenhouse; it may have had skylights, but for the most part it was sheathed in beadedged boards. Above an oak wainscoting the north and south walls were pierced by ranges of tall windows with bits of colored glass interspersed among the large clear panes. On the east the white-painted stone wall of the White House remained uncovered, with the pilasters intact. The two west windows of the State Dining Room were filled in with wood and plastered over inside and out. Pairs of tall glass doors separated the billiard room from the conservatory; when they were thrown open, the spaces ran together.

Grant often asked his guests to play billiards, and he did not like to lose. He would practice alone, wrote [William H.] Crook, “puffing clouds of smoke through half-closed lips, while he perfected himself in different shots and combinations.”

Billiard games often went on for hours, with ladies seated on the green leather sofas.

Male observers might sit in the long-legged chairs that offered closer surveillance of the table, or they might stand. The billiard room was the most popular gathering place in the house.20 The Grant Billiard Room may have been the most popular of gathering places in the history of the White House, but not necessarily because of its contents, decoration, or exalted visitors. Rather, it may have been the most popular because it was the favorite place of distraction and pleasure for a well-loved war-hero president and for a large presidential family well suited to thrive in the White House. For eight happy years the Grants never stopped trying to improve and personalize the Executive Residence. It is also the only time in the history of the house that an entire presidential family’s

portrait held a prominent place on the State Floor.

The White House “National Billiard Saloon” resided adjacent to the Julia Dent Grant’s “garden spot of orchids”21and is forever part of the history of a fascinating sporting presidency.

notes 1.

Kit Oldham, “Captain Ulysses S. Grant Arrives at Columbia (later Vancouver) Barracks on September 20, 1852,” posted February 20, 2003, History Link essay 5255, History Link website, http://www.historylink.org.

2. “1850, Abraham Lincoln’s Table of Choice,” entry in “The History of Brunswick from Workshop in Cincinnati to the Global Stage, 1845–1890,” Brunswick Billiards website, http://history. brunswickbilliards.com.

3. “General Grant Known As Great Billiard Fan,” Lewiston [Maine] Daily Sun, July 2, 1931, 1, printing a letter from George Phelan.

4. “Billiard Table for General Grant,” New York Times, May 15, 1867, 1.

5. Ulysses S. Grant, telegram to Phelan and Collender, NYC, May 22, 1867, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 17, January 1– September 30, 1867, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 447.

6. Ulysses S. Grant to William T. Sherman, February 2, 1869, in ibid., vol. 19, July 1, 1868–October 31, 1869, ed. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 123.

7. Washington National Republican, October 30, 1869.

8. Brevet Brigadier General Nathaniel Michler, Major of Engineers, U.S. Army and in charge of Public Buildings and Grounds, “The Statement in Detail of Expenditures ‘for Repairing and Refurnishing the President’s House’ for the Calendar-Year Ending the 31st of December 1869,” Records of the House of Representatives, Record Group 42, 41-A-F21.3, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. General Michler’s detailed entries reveal the extent of new items acquired for the large and extended Grant family.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. “A Billiard Room at the White House,” Washington Evening Star, September 22, 1869, 4.

12. “The American Tuileries, The Royal Palace of a Republican President,” New York Sun, January 17, 1870, 2.

13 Urbana [Ohio] Union, February 16, 1870, 1.

14. The information in this paragraph was provided by William G. Allman, Office of the Curator, The White House, November 1, 2016.

15. William H. Crook, Though Five Administrations: Reminiscences of Colonel William H. Crook, comp. and ed. Margarita Spalding Gerry (New York: Harpers & Brothers, 1910), 227.

16. Emily Apt Geer, “Lucy Webb Hayes and Her Influence upon Her Era,” Hayes Historical Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring 1976), online at Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums website, http://www.rbhayes.org.

17. Mineral Point [Wisc.] Tribune, December 30, 1880, 4.

18. Ulysses Dietz, great-great-grandson of President Grant, conversation with author, January 30, 2017; Inventory of Public Property, 1876, typescript, Office of the Curator, The White House, supplied by William G. Allman.

19. “Presidential Fun, Pastimes Enjoyed by Presidents from Washington to Cleveland: The White House Billiard Table,” Washington Evening Star, December 10, 1892, 10.

20. William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd ed.

(Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008), 448–49.

21. Quoted in Gilson Willets, Inside the White House (New York: Christian Herald, 1908), 138.

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Theodore Roosevelt The President Who Saved FOOTBALL MARY JO BINKER

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i n s e p t e m b e r 1 9 0 5 President Theodore Roosevelt received an urgent letter. Endicott Peabody, the headmaster of Groton, the Massachusetts prep school that Roosevelt’s son Kermit attended, did not complain about the boy’s academic performance or behavior. Instead he sought the president’s help on a more urgent matter—the game of football, which was then under attack for its violence and what Peabody called its “fundamental dishonesty” at the college level. Writing as one enthusiast to another, he asked, “What is the use of teaching a boy to play the game fairly at school if he is going to be subjected at college to a pressure which he can hardly be expected to withstand to play a tricky game?”

Peabody went on to describe the “unfair tactics” in use at Roosevelt’s alma mater Harvard, then one of the nation’s major football powerhouses. Peabody implored the president to do something, telling him he was “the one man, so far as I know,” who could bring the errant college coaches together to remind them of football’s “importance to the country” and the need to free the game “from the stigma which rests upon it.”1 Peabody’s letter to Roosevelt arrived at a crucial moment. Antifootball pressure had been building for some time. Although the game had been growing in popularity on college campuses ever since the Civil War (the Harvard-Yale game of 1894, for example, had drawn 25,000 fans), cheating,

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minimal officiating, lack of safety precautions, and increasing violence had brought criticism from the press, the public, and many university presidents, including Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot. Eliot, who had spent years trying to ban football, compared the game to the “supreme savagery” of war. “No other athletic sport used in colleges requires of the players this habitual disregard of the safety of opponents.”2 He spoke from experience. In 1905 the Ivy League was the epicenter of college football, with the best coaches and players—and the most cheating and violence. Besides the cheating taking place on the gridiron, gambling and the practice of paying so-called tramp athletes—nonstudents who moved from school to school—were also threatening the integrity of the game and its ethos of amateurism.3 Harvard’s president also deplored the fact that the game’s legitimate income—from ticket sales and concessions—was corrupting the academic atmosphere and elevating athletics at the expense of education, especially when some coaches, including Harvard’s, were making more money than the faculty.4 But it was college football’s brutality that really concerned Eliot and many of the game’s opponents. Although by 1905 some elements of the modern-day game had been developed—the shape of the ball, the 100 yard field with painted stripes at 5 yard intervals, the eleven-man team with a signal-calling quarterback, the concept of downs and

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President Theodore Roosevelt watches the Army-Navy football game at Princeton University, with his wife Edith by his side, December 2, 1905.

above

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Although many elements of modern-day football, including the 100 yard playing field with painted stripes at 5 yard intervals, had been developed by the time of this 1905 photograph of the Harvard–Yale game, the sport was bloody, with many safety rules yet to be set.

yards gained, the strategy of blocking before the ball carrier, and tackling below the waist—the overall style of play was still primitive. Since the forward pass was illegal at that time, players moved the ball by running and kicking. Teams typically massed at the center of the field and charged through their opponents, often with their arms linked. Reliance on such mass plays allowed opponents to attack each another with impunity because a referee could not see what was going on. Fistfights, eye injuries, and leaping on already tackled players were common.

Players also often tried intentionally to hurt their opponents, particularly those considered especially fast or skilled.5 In the 1894 Harvard-Yale game, for example, a Harvard player jammed his finger into the eye of a Yale player, causing blood to flow. Later a Yale player deliberately jumped on a Harvard player after a fair catch and broke his opponent’s collarbone. Although the Yale player was penalized, he remained in the game. Another Yale player took a hit to the head that left him so disoriented he could not find his team’s goalposts. He did, however, find the eye of another Harvard player, which he poked.

The game then descended into a melee so furious that it was dubbed the “Springfield Massacre,” for the town in Massachusetts where it was played.

Because of the intense violence, the two schools decided they would no longer play each other.6 Poor-quality equipment and player reluctance

to use it increased the chance of injury. Football helmets were not commonly worn and provided little protection in any case, as they were made of leather. Shoulder, knee, and thigh pads were similarly lightweight and worn outside a player’s jersey rather than inside. Nose and shin guards were available, but many players preferred not to wear them.7 The combination of cheating, brutality, ineffective and scarcely used equipment, and poor refereeing had lethal consequences. In the 1905 season eighteen football players, three of them college students, died due to injuries sustained on the field.8 Despite its many problems and potential for scandal, football’s adherents loved the game, not only for the skills and teamwork it taught but because they believed it made men out of boys.

This training seemed critically important at a time when traditional paths to manhood, such as settling the nation’s frontier, were ending and the comforts of urban life made Americans more sedentary. Charles Darwin’s idea of natural selection and Herbert Spencer’s concept of survival of the fittest encouraged belief in a link between the physical and mental health of people and of their societies. Tackling football’s abuses also resonated with the Progressive era’s political culture, which sought to reform the problems brought on by rapid industrialization and a laissez-fair economic system.9 Football supporters such as Peabody and Roosevelt feared that physical and moral decline of the nation’s youth would produce “mollycoddles” instead of vigorous men capable of sustaining America’s role as an emerging world power. As proponents of Muscular Christianity, which emphasized manliness, physical strength, health, athletic competition, and Christian ideals in personal life and politics, they considered football essential for the development of young men.10 Peabody expressed these ideas succinctly in a letter to Walter Camp, the legendary Yale football player and coach who was one of the chief arbiters and promoters of the game: In my work at Groton I am convinced that foot ball is of profound importance for the moral even more than for the physical development of the boys. In these days of exceeding comfort, the boys need an

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Roosevelt concurred: “The true sports for a manly race are sports like running, rowing, playing football and baseball, boxing and wrestling, shooting, riding and mountain climbing,” he wrote in an 1893 article for Harper’s Weekly. “Of all these sports there is no better sport than football.”12 Although Roosevelt participated in most of the “manly” sports he listed, his size, asthma, and poor eyesight prevented him from playing football.

But that did not prevent him from a long association with the game and its adherents. One of his best friends during his student days at Harvard was football star Robert Bacon, who would go on to become Roosevelt’s secretary of state and a prominent member of Roosevelt’s “tennis cabinet.”13 Roosevelt was also friendly with Camp, who was a major player on the rules committee of the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA). In 1895, while president of the New York City Police Commission, Roosevelt had supported Camp’s defense of football in Football Facts and Figures, based on a survey of football’s adherents including prep school headmasters such as Peabody, college professors, and former college football team captains. Following the “Springfield Massacre,” Roosevelt and Camp had worked together to bring Harvard and Yale, which Roosevelt described as “natural friends and natural rivals,” back to the gridiron. They renewed their annual contest in 1897.14 Given his love for football and perhaps because his own health had prohibited him from playing it, Roosevelt had encouraged his older sons, Theodore Jr. (“Ted”) and Kermit, to go out for the sport in prep school. “I am delighted to have you play football,” he wrote when Ted was a senior at Groton. “I believe in rough manly sports.”15 He declared himself “much pleased” when Kermit became captain of his third string team and wanted details about its composition and its opponents.16 Yet Roosevelt did not want his sons to compromise their schoolwork or their health and safety. He wrote to Kermit in 1903, “I should be very sorry to see either you or Ted devoting most of your attention to athletics, and I haven’t got any special ambition to see you shine

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With an illustration of a fashionable woman admiring a Yale student’s letterman’s sweater, the November 1894 cover of Harper’s Weekly portrayed the glamorous side of football ahead of the Harvard– Yale game. In reality, the game proved so bloody it was labeled the “Springfield Massacre” and the matchup was suspended for three years. below

Kermit Roosevelt (right) during football practice at Harvard, 1908.

Following in the footsteps of his older brother, Ted, Kermit had joined the freshman football team.

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opportunity to endure hardness and, it may be, suffering. Foot ball has in it the element which goes to make a soldier; and we must have it or some similar advantages, especially now when we are working for peace and hoping for the cessation of wars.11

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A tackle on the Harvard field, c. 1910.

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One of many statistical charts included in Walter Camp’s book, Football Facts and Figures, lists the Harvard teams’ football injuries by year, which though numerous, declined between 1890 and 1893.

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A page in a scrapbook preserved in the Library of Congress provides a glimpse into Ted Roosevelt’s football career at Harvard. Fourth from top right in his freshman team photo, he was described in a newspaper article titled “The Star” as “game all through and played left end for all there was in it.” The attention Ted received as the president’s son made him a target for opposing teams as well. He is seen being helped off of the field by his teammates after being injured.

overmuch in athletics in college . . . because I think it tends to take up too much time; but I do like to feel that you are manly and able to hold your own in rough, hardy sports.”17 At the same time, when Ted severely injured his ankle during a Groton game, Roosevelt was quick to advise his son to “get the best ankle support possible” because “you don’t want to find that next fall” that a rival “bested you . . . because your ankle gives out and his doesn’t.”18 By the fall of 1905 Ted was a freshman at Harvard, and he went out for the freshman team.

At 5 feet 8 inches and somewhere between 130 and 145 pounds, he was the smallest player on the squad.

Given his small size and his status as the president’s son, he was realistic about the likelihood of injuries, telling his father, “I have not been hurt much, but I will be lucky if I am not.”19 His words were prophetic. He was targeted during his team’s game against the Yale freshman squad. The Yale players hit him so hard and so often that Ted had to be helped off the field, having suffered a broken nose (previously broken playing football at Groton) and perhaps a concussion as well as many cuts and bruises. His father responded with congratulations and relief that Ted’s small size meant he would not make the varsity team. Ted himself minimized his injuries, writing his mother Edith, “I was not seriously hurt at all, just shaken up and bruised.”20 By the time the Yale freshman squad targeted Ted, his father had followed up on Peabody’s request. Despite a heavy schedule that included the signing of the peace treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War, which Roosevelt had brokered, mediating between France and Germany over control of Morocco, and discussions on Chinese immigration, meatpacking, and the Panama Canal, he had found the time to summon Camp and his football colleagues from Harvard and Princeton—then, with Yale, the most prominent Ivy League football programs—to a White House lunchtime summit on October 9.21 He also asked federal Judge George Gray, a former Democratic senator from Delaware, to attend, saying, “I want to take up the football situation and try to get the game played on a thoroughly clean basis.” Gray, however, did not attend.

Neither did Secretary of War William Howard Taft, a Yale alum whom Roosevelt added for balance. His place was taken by Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Elihu Root, a graduate of Hamilton College.22 Roosevelt’s effort to clean up football was consistent with his proclivity for reform, intervention,

and mediation. (He had already approved the Food and Drug Act, intervened in a coal strike, and negotiated an end to railroad rate disputes.) His efforts on behalf of football also resonated with his advocacy for “true sports” and the “strenuous life.” Ironically, Roosevelt had entered the White House fearing that too much media coverage of his sporting activities would diminish him in the eyes of voters. By the time of his football summit, his fears had dissipated. Americans relished seeing their “sporting president” enjoying his athletic pastimes. His refusal to shoot a cornered bear while on a 1902 hunting trip had even sparked a national craze for “Teddy” bears. So when Roosevelt decided to take up the cause of football reform, a New York Times reporter cheekily described the summit as the president’s effort to deal with “another question of vital interest to the American people.”23 The president’s approach to the football paladins was direct and emphatic. “Football is on trial,” he said. After telling the group he believed in the game, Roosevelt said, “I want to do all I can to save it. And so I have called you all down here to see whether you won’t all agree to abide by both the letter and spirit of the rules, for that will help.”24 According to Harvard coach Bill Reid, who recorded the meeting in his diary, Roosevelt went on to discuss “unfair play.” He then asked “if there was not some way in which the feeling between the colleges could be improved and the training of the players made more effective in the right way.” His request elicited little enthusiasm. Reid reported that Camp was “very slippery and did not allow himself to be pinned down to anything. The Princeton and Yale men both disclaimed any knowledge of any man’s having been hurt purposely in any of the games,” although Reid claimed to have witnessed such injuries at a Yale-Princeton game.25 Roosevelt may have spoken softly, but he carried a big stick in the form of his prestige as the nation’s premier fan. Despite their lack of enthusiasm, Camp, Reid, and the other Ivy League coaches understood that ignoring the president’s concerns would have serious consequences. While Roosevelt did not have the authority to ban football, his support was vital to keeping the game on campus. So when Roosevelt asked the attendees to issue a joint statement of purpose, they agreed. The president undoubtedly hoped that if the Big Three Ivy League schools would agree to play more ethically and less violently, other schools and colleges would fall into line.

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Harvard football players demonstrate the illegal move of striking a player’s face with one’s hand in a 1901 photograph.

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Harvard Graduates Athletic Association saying he had become convinced “that the game as it is played to-day has fundamental faults which cannot be removed by any mere technical revision of the rules.”

He continued: Although I am willing to admit that the necessary roughness of the game may be objectionable . . . that appears to me to be much less serious than the fact that there is a distinct advantage to be gained from brutality and the evasion of the rules—offenses which, in many instances, the officials cannot detect because they are committed when the players and the ball also are hidden from the eyes of the umpire.

For these reasons I have come to believe that the game ought to be radically changed.

He asked the association to appoint a committee to “make a careful investigation of the subject, and to report such thorough-going alternations . . . as will remove the unfair advantage now obtained from violation of the rules, will put a higher premium on skill, make mere weight and strength of less value, and . . . produce a more scientific and interesting sport.”28 Reid’s letter, coming as it did from a member

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H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y A R C H I V E S

As football’s leading arbiter and the editor of its rule book, Camp drafted the statement the other participants signed. They “agreed that we consider an honorable obligation existed to carry out in letter and in spirit the rules of the game of football relating to roughness, holding, and foul play and the active coaches of our Universities being present with us pledge themselves to so regard it, and to do their utmost to carry out these obligations.”26 Camp sent Roosevelt the statement telling him he would not release it to the press until the president had approved it. Roosevelt did so and in a separate letter to Camp told him, “I cannot tell you how pleased I am at the way you have taken hold.

Now that the matter is in your hands I am more than content to abide by whatever you do.”27 Uncharacteristically for a man who considered the presidency a “bully pulpit,” Roosevelt said nothing publicly about the meeting because he wanted reform to emanate from the sport’s leaders. Reform, however, would not come without a struggle. In early November, Reid heard that Eliot was again trying to abolish football at Harvard. Reid acted fast. Working with a sports-minded editor at the Boston Globe, his coaching assistants, and his friend, Herbert White, Reid wrote an open letter to the

of the IFA rules committee and the coach of a major program, caused a sensation. It was reprinted in newspapers all over the country and, Reid believed, brought the game some badly needed breathing room. The reprieve proved to be brief, however. Harvard’s game with the University of Pennsylvania on November 11 reignited the controversy. For openers, the night before the game Penn soaked the field with water. The next day the Penn players wore shoes with oversize cleats that gave them traction in the mud while the Harvard players slipped and slid on the field. During the game—a gridiron contest characterized by what the New York Times called “a deal of off-side play, holding, and other foul work”—a Harvard player was ejected for hitting the Penn center with his fists.

The Harvard player claimed his action was justified because the Penn center had hit him “in the balls not once but several times.”29 Roosevelt was not amused. He promptly invited Reid back to the White House for a one-on-one meeting to discuss the incident. He reminded the Harvard coach of their previous meeting, saying “it doesn’t look too well to have Harvard the first college to break” the agreement the football leadership had reached. Much to his relief, Reid was able to explain the situation to Roosevelt’s satisfaction

and the furor subsided.30 Reid barely had time to breathe before he was again summoned to the White House to explain what had happened at the Harvard-Yale game on November 25. Although the New York Times had reported that Roosevelt’s “earnest words . . . in behalf of cleaner sport” had had a positive effect on the game, little had changed. During the first half, a Yale back “struck” a Harvard player “square in the face,” knocking him out and “breaking his nose,” according to Reid, after the Harvard player had called for a fair catch and then been tackled. Reid believed the referee’s failure to disqualify the Yale player cost Harvard the game. As it happened the referee, Paul Dashiell, a faculty member at the U.S. Naval Academy, was a proponent of football and a well-regarded referee. He also sat on the IFA football rules committee with Reid and Camp.31 When Dashiell heard that Roosevelt had called Reid back to the White House he was frantic. He knew Reid’s opinion of him (after the Harvard-Yale debacle, Reid had told Dashiell he would never referee another Harvard game).

Moreover, Dashiell was up for a new position at the Naval Academy and knew Roosevelt could end his teaching career with a stroke of the pen.

R I G H T : T H E O D O R E R O O S E V E LT C O L L E C T I O N , H A R VA R D C O L L E G E L I B R A R Y FA R R I G H T : H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y A R C H I V E S

Theodore Roosevelt and Harvard coach Bill Reid (below right, 1901) were allies in the fight to save football and worked together to promote rule changes that would reduce injuries on the field.

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He wrote the president an apologetic letter saying, “I regret the injury that it has done to the game, now in so critical a condition.” Dashiell’s on-field action and his subsequent apology handed Roosevelt another stick to use in his effort to save college football. He encouraged Dashiell to work with Reid to reform the game.32 As unpleasant as the Harvard-Yale incident had been, it was nothing compared to what happened when New York University (NYU) and Union College played in the Bronx on the same day as the Harvard-Yale contest. In that game, a Union player suffered a cerebral hemorrhage when a tackler’s knee hit him in the head. Four hours later the Union player was dead. This death galvanized NYU’s chancellor Henry MacCracken. Believing that “older and larger universities” (i.e., the Ivy League schools) should lead the way, he immediately called on Harvard’s Eliot to convene a conference of college presidents “to undertake the reform or the abolition of football.”33 MacCracken’s call also energized football’s opponents in the press and elsewhere in academe.

The Nation, one of the staunchest opponents in the media, demanded immediate and drastic action. After quoting the dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, who called football “a boy-killing, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport,” the article went on to say “the real question before the public to-day is whether it is worth while to attempt to modify the game or whether it should not be abolished forthwith.” The article concluded, “Football has become not merely intolerable in itself, but a grave menace to American scholastic ideals and development. . . . A few schools and small colleges have abolished football, but its death-blow must come from such an institution as Harvard or Columbia.”34 Columbia quickly complied, as did Union College and Northwestern, while the University of California and Stanford began the process of replacing football with rugby. Meanwhile another university president, William Harper of the University of Chicago, wrote Roosevelt asking him to impose regulations on football. For once Roosevelt stifled his reformist instincts, telling Harper, “I am not undertaking the regulation of football. . . . I believe in the game and want to keep it, and I think much of the outburst about it hysterical; but on the other hand I think it cannot be kept unless there is a very resolute effort made to cut out the abuses.”35

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Roosevelt did reach out to Eliot, urging him to join the reform movement, but Harvard’s president did not take the hint. He wrote back saying football should be forbidden for a time. Roosevelt disagreed vehemently, saying, “I do not agree with you that the game should be stopped.” Then he went one step further, saying pointedly, “I further think that the one reason why [football’s abuses] are not remedied is that so many of our people whose voices would be potent in reforming the game, try to abolish it instead.”36 Eliot’s refusal to be involved with football’s reform left the field to McCracken, who convened a December conference attended by thirteen schools: NYU, Columbia, Rutgers, Rochester, Stevens Institute, Union, Fordham, Haverford, Lafayette, Swarthmore, Syracuse, Wesleyan, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Apart from narrowly defeating Columbia’s motion to abolish the game, the group accomplished little except to agree to invite other schools to join them for another meeting at the end of the month.37 The next few weeks passed in a flurry of activity as proponents of the game jockeyed for position. Reid worked with Harvard’s athletic committee to draw up a long list of rule changes. He and Dashiell also worked to keep the IFA’s football rules committee from taking any action one way or another. McCracken was busy as well, arranging for the late December meeting that drew sixty-eight participants. Again Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were conspicuous by their absence. At this second meeting the group voted to set up its own rules committee and try to merge it with the IFA rules committee. If that attempt failed, the group planned to develop a separate set of rules to make the game safer and more open.

Reid and Harvard were moving in the same direction, albeit with a more drastic goal. They, too, wanted to work with the IFA rules committee, but if an agreement could not be reached, Harvard would end its program. Some at Yale, which had dominated the football rivalry between the two schools, would have welcomed such a development, but Camp did not. He knew football needed Harvard, and he was willing to compromise.38 Throughout this period Roosevelt was also active. According to the New York Times, he met again with Reid at the White House and reportedly conferred “personally and by letter with football authorities.” He also encouraged the superintendent

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Harvard football players practice, 1910.

at West Point to support the reform movement.39 Ultimately, in January 1906 McCracken’s group merged with the IFA rules committee, and the new organization christened itself the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (IAA). Reid became the group’s secretary, and Camp became less influential, although he continued to edit the annual rulebook and establish the centralized board of officials.

The new organization then proceeded to overhaul football.40 The new rules instituted in 1906 constituted an extreme makeover. For starters, the IAA increased the yardage necessary to gain a first down from 5 to 10. To reduce injuries and cheating, the association created a neutral zone at the line of scrimmage that gave the referees an unobstructed view and prevented opposing players from attacking each other without penalties being assessed.

To reduce the destructiveness of mass momentum plays, the IAA limited the number of players who could line up in the backfield to five. The new rules also shortened the game from seventy to sixty minutes, with three optional timeouts to cut down on fatigue-related injuries. It added more referees (previously two referees had been allowed, each

chosen by one of teams) and outlawed hurdling— the practice of boosting ball carriers in the air in an attempt to gain extra yards. Tackling below the knee or out of bounds was penalized, along with kneeing, elbowing, kicking, or striking an opponent’s face with the heel of the hand. Players who displayed unsportsmanlike conduct such as abusive language directed toward opponents or referees would be suspended for one game; a second violation would bring suspension for the season. The most important innovation, however, was the introduction of the forward pass, which opened up the game.41 The 1906 season was the acid test for the new rules. Teams struggled, but the rules made the game safer: the number of deaths dropped from eighteen to eleven. Roosevelt continued to support the game, telling the Harvard Union in 1907 that he did not in the least object to a sport because it is rough. . . . Moreover, it is to my mind simple nonsense, a mere confession of weakness, to desire to abolish a game because tendencies

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show themselves, or practices grow up, which prove the game ought to be reformed. . . . We cannot afford to turn out of college men who shrink from physical effort or a little physical pain. In any republic courage is a prime necessity for the average citizen; and he needs physical courage no less than moral courage. . . . Athletics are good, especially in their rougher forms, because they tend to develop such courage. They are good also because they encourage a true democratic spirit; for in the athletic field the man must be judged not with reference to outside and accidental attributes, but to that combination of bodily vigor and moral quality which go to make up prowess.

If reform was needed, Roosevelt thought it should come from “college authorities” and be as “little officious as possible” and “as rigorous as is necessary to achieve the end.”42 Football was not out of the woods completely, however. A spate of injury-related deaths in 1909 brought renewed calls for football’s abolition. In response, the IAA made more rule changes: limiting the number of players on the line of scrimmage to seven, banning the rushing and pulling of ball carriers, and allowing just one player in the

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offensive backfield to move before the ball was snapped. More innovations followed. After the 1911 season, the value of a touchdown was raised to 6 points. Field goals were reduced from 4 points to 3. Passes could cross the goal line for touchdowns.

The number of downs was increased from three to four. The shape of the ball changed as well, becoming longer.43 By then Roosevelt was no longer president.

However, his timely intervention had proved to be the catalyst college football needed to reform and reinvent itself. Endicott Peabody had been right. Roosevelt had turned out “the one man” who could remind a contentious group of rival coaches of football’s “importance to the country.” While the full impact of Roosevelt’s intervention may never be known, it is undeniable that his public and private support were essential links in the chain of events that led to the transformation of college football and its eventual growth into a professional sport. Ironically, for a man who feared being known as the sporting president, Roosevelt saved one of America’s favorite games.

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Harvard fans stand to form the letter “H” beneath a score board reading “Yale 0 / Harv 22” in 1914. By then many rules had been implemented to reduce injuries on the field.

notes 1. Endicott Peabody to Theodore Roosevelt, September 16, 1905, Theodore Roosevelt Papers. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C., online at the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, Digital Library, https:// www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org.

2. Charles W. Eliot, “President Eliot’s Report for 1892–’93,” Harvard Graduates Magazine 2 (March 1894): 378, 382.

3. Tim Brady, His Father’s Son: The Life of Ted Roosevelt Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2017), 40; Kathleen D. Valenzi, Champion of Sport: The Life of Walter Camp, 1859–1925 (Boston: Howell Press, 1990), 67.

4. Eliot, “President Eliot’s Report,” 377; John J. Miller, The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 187.

5. Craig Lambert and John T. Bethell, “First and 100,” Harvard Magazine, September–October 2003, online at https://www. harvardmagazine.com; Brady, His Father’s Son, 40–41; Valenzi, Champion of Sport, 50, 52.

6. Jacqueline Sahlberg, “Memorable Games in Harvard–Yale History,” Yale News, November 18, 2001; Miller, Big Scrum, 136–38.

attendees were Edwin Nichols and Bill Reid of Harvard and John Fine and Arthur Hildebrand of Princeton. Des Jardins, Walter Camp, 180.

22. Ibid., 180; Miller, Big Scrum, 186.

23. “Roosevelt Campaign for Football Reform,” New York Times, October 10, 1905, 1. The article also reported that the meeting was noteworthy because of “persistent rumors” that Roosevelt would become president of Harvard after he left the White House.

24. Quoted in Miller, Big Scrum, 187–88.

25. Bill Reid, Big-Time Football at Harvard, 1905: The Diary of Coach Bill Reid, ed. Ronald A. Smith (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 193–94.

26. Quoted in bid., 194–95.

27. Quoted in Miller, Big Scrum, 190.

28. “Reid Condemns Football,” Harvard Graduates Magazine 14 (December 1905): 300.

29. “Penn Beats Harvard After Hard Struggle,” New York Times, November 12, 1905, 10; Miller, Big Scrum, 194–95; Reid, BigTime Football, ed. Smith, 275–77.

30. Quoted in Miller, Big Scrum, 195.

8. John S. Watterson, “The Gridiron Crisis of 1905: Was It Really a Crisis?” Journal of Sports History 27, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 294.

31. Reid, Big-Time Football, ed. Smith, 316–17; “President Eliot Not There,” New York Times, November 26, 1905, 5; “President Summons Reid,” New York Times, November 30, 1905, 6; Miller, Big Scrum, 196–97.

7. Brady, His Father’s Son, 41.

9. Miller, Big Scrum, 37–40.

32. Quoted in Miller, Big Scrum, 197.

10. Julie Des Jardins, Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 10–11, 14.

33. “Union Football Player Dies After N.Y.U. Game,” New York Tribune, November 26, 1905, 1.

11. Endicott Peabody to Walter Camp, November 23, 1909, quoted in Frank D. Ashburn, Peabody of Groton (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1967), 195.

34. “Football Reform by Abolition,” Nation, November 30, 1905, 437–38.

12. Theodore Roosevelt, “Value of an Athletic Training,” Harper’s Weekly, December 23, 1893, 1236.

13. Roosevelt’s cabinet included several college athletes, among them Leslie Shaw, William Howard Taft, William Moody, George Cortelyou, Paul Morton, and Victor Metcalf. Des Jardins, Walter Camp, 179.

14. Miller, Big Scrum, 152.

15. Quoted in Brady, His Father’s Son, 34.

16. Theodore Roosevelt, Letters to Kermit from Theodore Roosevelt, 1902–1908, ed. Will Irwin (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), 44.

35. Quoted in Miller, Big Scrum, 199.

36. Quoted in ibid., 199–200.

37. Ibid., 201; “Football Conference Will Convene Today,” New York Times, December 8, 1905, 9.

38. Miller, Big Scrum, 202–03.

39. “Football Conference at the White House,” New York Times, December 5, 1905, 11; Miller, Big Scrum, 203–04, 208.

40. Miller, Big Scrum, 203–04; Des Jardins, Walter Camp, 189–90.

The IAA became the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1910.

41. Des Jardins, Walter Camp, 189–90; Miller, Big Scrum, 208–09.

19. Quoted in ibid., 39.

42. Theodore Roosevelt, speech at the Harvard Union, February 23, 1907, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States website, http://theodore-roosevelt.com. Three of the eleven deaths were college players. Miller, Big Scrum, 212.

20. Both letters are in ibid., 43–44.

43. Miller, Big Scrum, 217–18.

17. Ibid., 42–43.

18. Quoted in Brady, His Father’s Son, 34.

21. Besides Walter Camp and John Owsley of Yale, the other

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Hoover Ball and Wellness in the WHITE HOUSE

HERBERT HOOVER PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

m at t h ew s ch aef er

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and bore closer resemblance to keepaway than to the game that eventually came to be called Hoover Ball.

Hoover Ball did not spring fully formed from the head of Joel Boone like some modern-day Athena. It took shape over the course of several months and eventually developed codified rules. The first assembly of what came to be called the medicine ball cabinet numbered six men: President Hoover, his personal secretary Larry Richey, Dr. Boone, Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of Agriculture Arthur Hyde, and Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone. Immediately after this first match, Boone insisted that Hoover have another full medical examination— pulse, blood pressure, blood draw, EKG, and X-rays of the lungs and teeth. While Boone’s memoirs are silent on the reasons why he went to such extremes, it is easy to surmise that the ghost of Warren Harding informed his actions. Boone was at Harding’s bedside when he died in San Francisco. Losing two presidents while serving as White House physician would have had a deleterious impact on Boone’s career.

The game became a ritual for Hoover and an ever-changing cadre of fitness enthusiasts, friends, and power brokers who sought face-time with the president.

As the game was played on the South Lawn of the White House, it soon came to the attention of the press. Edward G. Lowry, writing in the August 31, 1929, Saturday Evening Post, recounted that nearly two hundred men had played at least one game of “volleyball” during the first months of the Hoover administration. Twelve to sixteen men arrived six days each week at 7:00 a.m. and enjoyed the rigorous game for the next thirty minutes, playing on teams of four to a side, subbing in and out to catch their breath.3 Hoover’s friend William Hard offered more insight into why the president played this game in his September

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previous spread

President Herbert Hoover and his compatriots play Hoover Ball on the White House Grounds, February 1933. opposite

President Hoover (standing, sixth from right) and his Hoover Ball “play fellows” pose in front of the South Portico of the White House in 1933.

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i n t o d ay ’ s c o r p o r at e w o r l d, progressive businesses make an effort to stand out from their peers. One avenue of distinction is to include worklife balance and wellness as part of the mission statement, demonstrating a much-publicized commitment to the well-being of their employees. It may come as a surprise to learn that Herbert Hoover embraced workplace wellness while serving as president. In March 1929, the White House physician, Joel T. Boone, created Hoover Ball, a combination of tennis, volleyball, and medicine ball, to keep Hoover in fighting trim to meet the demands of the presidency.

Shortly after Hoover took the Oath of Office on March 4, 1929, he met with Dr. Boone for the customary physical. Boone, who had served presidents since Warren G. Harding, described the results of his March 10 examination of Hoover: “Very good physical condition except that his pulse was not as strong as expected. Showed dyspnea upon two minutes exertion. BP 120/70. Normal heart. Chest clear. He had three-inch expansion. Too much avoirdupois.”

Boone recommended that Hoover lose 25 pounds by taking up a reducing diet and “practicing deep breathing exercises out in fresh air.”1 Hoover and Boone discussed the nature of the exercise needed. In his memoirs Hoover laid out the problem succinctly: “Getting daily exercise to keep physically fit is always a problem for Presidents. Once the day’s work starts there is little chance to walk, to ride or to take part in a game.”2 Hoover demanded something stimulating that engaged his entire body and his mind.

Boone suggested tossing an 8-pound medicine ball back and forth. Hoover and Boone were familiar with this form of exercise as they had seen sailors throwing the ball around on the decks of battleships while on Hoover’s South American tour in December 1928. The sailors’ game was called “bull in the ring”

1929 article in World’s Work. Describing Hoover as a “gregarious hermit,” Hard explained that “the idea of solitarily and repeatedly bending over and touching the toes ten times made him tired before he started. . . . The truth is that the President is rather easily bored.” So medicine ball worked for Hoover on many levels. “Medicine ball has given him at last a form of vigorous exercise which he obviously enjoys, and it has given Hoover people about him almost as soon as he opens his eyes in the morning.”4 The game had the desired physical impact. Hoover lost 25 pounds and completed his term without missing a single day due to illness.

The New York Times reporter William Atherton Du Puy is credited with naming the game “Hoover Ball.”

In a November 1931 article Du Puy

commented, “Stopping a six-pound ball with steam back of it, returning it with similar steam, is not pink-tea stuff. . . . Dr. Boone estimates that as much beneficial exercise is obtained from half an hour of Hoover Ball as from three times as much tennis or six times as much golf.”5 The game must have appealed to Hoover’s desire for efficiency, for he described it similarly in his memoirs: “It required less skill than tennis, was faster and more vigorous, and therefore gave more exercise in a shorter time.” Hoover’s memoirs further explained that this was no kitchen cabinet; by common consent the conversation steered clear of official matters. He reminisced: “The morning star shells of humor from the trenches often illuminated the dreary no-man’s land of the depression.”6

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Joel Boone also saw the game as a way to relieve stress. He wrote: “During the half hour of strenuous effort Mr. Hoover forgets that he is President of the United States. Mr. Hoover is not permitted to think about anything but the six pound ball hurtling toward him!” This was especially true if the ball was hurled by Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone, a former college football player, who at 6 feet 3 inches and 220 pounds still had the strength and synapses to inflict bodily harm on the opponent who let his mind wander.7 Hoover did not allow his opponents to mollycoddle him. Thomas Healy wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Hoover would not countenance anybody treating him differently than any other player. He would resent it very much. He was one of us; he wanted in no way to

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These still images were captured from a Kodacolor film made of President Hoover playing Hoover Ball on the White House Grounds with his “friends and early morning play fellows.” From their varied movements and expressions one can see that it was an active, physical game. In this instance, however, a net was not used. The film was found in the archive of the Hoover Library in 2014. While the videographer is not known, it is possible the film was taken by Lou Hoover, as she was often behind the camera and made several of the films in the library’s collection. President Hoover

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is seen holding the ball in the still at right and appears throughout the sequence.

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and stuck to their task, but there was no disputing the fact that they were glad when the President called the game.”9 As the Hoover presidency entered its final days, the members of the medicine ball cabinet made plans to commemorate their shared time. For his part, Hoover purchased sixteen of the regulation size 5-pound balls and autographed them for the most frequent players. The group gathered at the house of Harlan Stone in late February 1933 for a farewell party.10 Here Hoover had the players sign each ball so that all had a memento of their mornings together. For their part, the players presented Hoover with a silver humidor, with an image of the White House, the lawn, and the Hoover Ball court etched on the lid, surrounded by the signatures of the sixteen men who formed the core group of players.11 The gift of a humidor to celebrate a fitness activity might strike the modern sensibility as ironic, but at the time smoking cigars was seen as another way to relieve stress.

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above and opposite

The lid of the silver humidor given to President Hoover during a farewell party by his fellow players at the close of his administration is etched with an image of the White House, the South Lawn, two of the Hoovers’ many dogs, and the Hoover Ball court. The humidor and a Hoover Ball autographed by the players are preserved in the collection of the Hoover Library.

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be favored because he was President of the United States.”8 Hoover Ball was played throughout Hoover’s tenure, in all weather and through all seasons. The games often ended with the participants joining the president for coffee and juice before beginning the workday. Wilbur, Hoover’s friend since their Stanford days, gave Hoover Ball three pages in his memoirs. He noted that the game evolved some “White House” rules to level the field of play. For instance, Wilbur was not allowed to play in the front court because his 6 foot 5 inch height gave him too great an advantage.

Wilbur took particular delight in describing the game that took place when the Stanford 1894 football team visited the White House. The former gridiron stars took the court against the more experienced Hoover Ballers: “For a short time they threw the six pound ball fairly well, but the weight soon began to tell on them and it was evident that most of them were through. They were game

The Official Rules of HOOVERBALL th e o fficia l co urt is 66 b y 30 f eet. The ball is to weigh 4 to 6 pounds.

This contrasts with a volleyball, which weighs less than 10 ounces. The Hoover Ball consists of a hand-stitched leather cover around a sandbag core wrapped in cotton batting. The net is to be 8 feet high. Teams consist of two to four players. Scoring is exactly like tennis: love, 15, 30, 40 (deuce, ad-in, ad-out), game. Teams play matches of best of five or seven games. Points are scored when a team fails to catch the ball, fails to return the ball across the net, returns the ball out-of- bounds, or fails to return the ball to the proper court area. Points in question are played over. Good sportsmanship is expected.

The ball is served from the back line. The serve is rotated among one team until the game is won. Teams alternate serving after each game. Teams change courts after every two games. The ball must be caught on the fly and returned from the point it was caught. There is no running with the ball or passing to teammates. Each team’s court is divided in half, with the mid-court line part of the front court. A ball caught in the front half of the court must be returned to the back half of the opponent’s court. This prevents spiking. If the ball does not reach the back court, the opponent wins the point. Balls caught must be played. A player who is carried out-of-bounds by the force of the ball may return in-bounds before the return. A ball that hits the out-of-bounds line is considered in-bounds. A ball that hits the net on the way over is a live ball but if thrown from the front court must reach the opponent’s back court to be good. Teams may substitute freely at dead ball situations.

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The farewell party at Stone’s home also included the wives of the principals.

Several wrote verses to capture the moment. With apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Helen Boone wrote: He was the White House doctor And he stoppeth one in three A Justice of the Supreme Court Who was on his way to tea.

“What wantest thou?” the Justice said, With a glitter in his eye.

“To join the President’s Medicine Ball, Before the sun is high.”

“But I’ve not thrown a medicine ball Since I was twenty-four.

And now I’m in my sixties, I’ll exercise no more!”12

Aside from this party, the wives of the Hoover Ballers held themselves aloof from the early morning exercises until the very last day of Hoover’s presidency.

On March 3, 1933, twelve of the ladies

made a surprise visit to the game, led by Lou Henry Hoover. As Wilbur reported in his memoirs, the ladies at first were content to watch the game, politely cheering and applauding good plays.

However, they soon picked up a ball and began a game of their own. The gentlemen quit their game and ceded the court to the ladies. Wilbur wrote, “Mrs. Chapin, a star basketball player in her college days, seemed to be the star, but Mrs. Hoover was a close rival.”14 Attentive readers may have caught that the Hoover Ball did not seem to have a fixed weight. The weight appears to have dropped from 6 pounds in 1929 to 5 pounds by March 3, 1933.

The weight attributed to the ball varied more widely as time passed and memories took on a nostalgic sheen. Fish have been known to grow in length and weight as fisherman recount their exploits over time. Channeling his inner angler, Hoover exaggerated as he described his namesake game in his memoirs: “The game was played by passing an eight-pound ball over a ten-foot net.”15 Hoover stretched the truth on both dimensions. Still, it did not diminish the fact that a dozen middle-aged

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An unattributed poet leaned heavily on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the Medicine Ball Gang’s mad career.

Hardly a morning but they are seen Cavorting on the White House green.

She then rambled through ten verses gently ribbing each of the players, before closing: Last, but not least, is our kindly Chief.

He has not missed a single day And that is more than we can say.

We owe to him that this brief hour Means much to us and will mean more As memory recalls these days When we have gone our several ways.13

men engaged in high-intensity interval training for thirty minutes six days each week.

After Hoover left the White House, Hoover Ball disappeared from the public consciousness for decades. The game was revived in the late 1980s by Scott Sailor, a high school journalism teacher and self-designated Hoover Ball commissioner for the Hoover Presidential Foundation. Sailor’s energy and vision led to the reestablishment of the game, which is hosted by the foundation every year in conjunction with Hoover’s birthday, August 10. Participants in the first annual Hoover Ball national championship in 1988 said the game was like running and lifting weights at the same time. Sailor was able to persuade Herbert (“Pete”) Hoover III, the president’s grandson, to join in the competition. Pete Hoover’s team won its first round match, but he left the team saying he was not sure about the game: “The way this tournament is structured, the more you win, the more you play. You people are slow learners. Find a substitute.”16 The Hoover Ball national championships are still contested annually in West Branch, Iowa, hosted by the

HERBERT HOOVER PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

For decades a forgotten sport, Hoover Ball has enjoyed a renaissance since the 1980s.

This photograph of a women’s game was taken during the annual competition hosted by the Hoover Presidential Foundation since 1988.

Hoover Presidential Foundation.

Hoover Ball’s renaissance continued into the twenty-first century. The game has broadened its reach thanks to the popularity of CrossFit and the rise of nontraditional sports. CrossFit founder Greg Glassman gave Hoover Ball a boost when he mentioned in a 2003 article that a thirty minute game challenged the fittest of his staff trainers. Of course, these trainers were not content to use a 5- or 6-pound ball; they chose a 20-pound ball. CrossFit boxes include various sizes of medicine balls in its workouts of the day, so many fitness enthusiasts have access to Hoover Balls of the appropriate weight.17 As the rules are simple, all it takes is a ball, a volleyball court, and six to eight fanatics to have a game. High school gym classes in Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and California include Hoover Ball as a way of teaching history and physical education simultaneously. YouTube has dozens of videos of folks playing Hoover Ball. My personal favorite shows James Harrison, 39-year-old NFL linebacker, playing against unnamed opponents using a 20-pound ball on a sand volleyball court!18 Clearly Harrison is an outlier in several dimensions of physical fitness.

The June 2015 Men’s Journal identified Hoover Ball as one of the fourteen world championships that anyone could win, ranking just above the mobile phone throwing event in Finland.19 I am not sure that I agree with this conclusion. The winners of the Hoover Ball national championships hosted annually by the Hoover Presidential Foundation tend to be teams of firemen, college athletes, and CrossFitters on their off day.

Despite the prowess honed by four years of near-daily practice, I doubt that the middle-aged, sedentary politicos of the original medicine ball cabinet would advance far in the bracket. If Herbert Hoover were magically able to watch Hoover Ball today, he would doubtless agree with his grandson Pete: “This is no game for old men.”20 white house history quarterly

notes 1.

Joel T. Boone, “Autobiography: Chapter XXII, The Hoover Administration,” 51–52, Joel T. Boone Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, West Branch, Iowa.

2. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933 (New York: MacMillan Company, 1952), 327.

3. Edward G. Lowry, “Mr. Hoover at Work and at Play,” Saturday Evening Post, August 31, 1929, 10–11, 39–42.

4. William Hard, “Hoover the President,” World’s Work, September 1929, 85–88.

5. William Atherton Du Puy, “At the White House at 7:00 a.m.,” New York Times Magazine, November 29, 1931, V4.

6. Hoover, Memoirs, 327.

7. Boone, “Autobiography, Chapter XXII, The Hoover Administration,” 57d, Boone Papers.

8. Thomas Healy, “How Medicine Ball Cabinet Keeps President in Condition,” Philadelphia Inquirer, n.d., cited by Boone, “Autobiography, Chapter XXII, The Hoover Administration,” 57k, Boone Papers.

9. Ray Lyman Wilbur, Memoirs, ed. Edgar Eugene Robinson and Paul Carroll Edwards (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 545.

10. Ibid.

11. “Hoover Plans to Autograph Medicine Balls as Souvenirs,” New York Times, February 8, 1933, 3-5.

12. Helen Boone, “Medicine Ball, undated,” box 227, Herbert Hoover Papers, Presidential Subject Files, Hoover Presidential Library and Museum.

13. “Medicine Ball, 1929–1933,” box 1, Walter H. Newton Papers, ibid.

14. Wilbur, Memoirs, ed. Robinson and Edwards, 545.

15. Hoover, Memoirs, 327.

16. Quoted in Tom Walsh, “Hoover-Ball: A Former President’s Unusual Pastime Wins the Popular Vote in West Branch,” Iowan 40, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 22–26.

17. Greg Glassman, “Hooverball,” CrossFit Journal, no. 6 (February 2003), online at http://journal. crossfit.com.

18. Nick English, “Why Is James Harrison Playing Volleyball with a Medicine Ball?” Barbend, updated June 27, 2017, online at https:// barbend.com.

19. Lauren Steele, “Fourteen World Championships Anyone Can Win,” Men’s Journal, June 2015, online at https://www.mensjournal.com.

20. Quoted in Walsh, “Hoover-Ball,” 25.

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CAPTURING A Moment in Time Remembering My Summer Photographing President Eisenhower

UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER / COURTESY AL FRENI

AL FRENI

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OPPOSITE AND

PHOTO-OP DAY, AUGUST 16, 1955 it was sixty-four years ago, and I was just shy of 22 years old, serving in the military. At Lowry Air Force Base in Denver. I was a photographer for the Lowry Airmen, the base newspaper. That summer, the summer of 1955, I was assigned to be the official military Summer White House photographer, to cover President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s stay, starting August 14. It was the third summer at Lowry for the president, and what I will always remember is Press Secretary Jim Hagerty wearing his New York Yankees baseball cap. At Lowry, the president relaxed, taking pleasure in golfing and fishing and in being with his family. But these were also working vacations, with visits from generals and heads of

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state and sportsmen from all over the world.

As I sat in the backseat with my camera and photo equipment in a USAF 1950s blue Chevrolet staff car, headed into the Colorado Rocky Mountains, I could not believe that I was traveling with top photographers from the Associated Press, United Press International, International News Service, Life magazine, and Fox 5. In the company of photographers Maurice Johnson, Stan Tretick, Harvey George, Carl Iwasaki, Gene Willet, and other journalists, we were to be with President Eisenhower and his seven-year-old grandson for a fun day of golfing, fishing, and horsemanship at his friend Aksel Nielsen’s Byers Peak Ranch near Fraser, a vacation retreat in the Colorado Rockies. A press room at an old train deport with a pot-bellied stove

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Al Freni (on steps) at work documenting President Dwight D. Eisenhower during his summer vacation at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, 1955.

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opposite and above

Al Freni captured young David Eisenhower’s golf swing from behind (above) while the photographers he included in his shot captured the swing head on, with Freni in the background (opposite).

added to the frontier atmosphere. The president and David wore cowboy hats, as did members of the photo group, and an atmosphere of relaxation prevailed.

GOLF The day was cloudy but bright. The setting was in a clearing at the ranch with several log cabins and many large trees. All you could hear were the sounds of nature: the large blackbirds crowing overhead and a slight breeze moving the branches.

Press Secretary Jim Hagerty arranged the setup with the president and the photo group. My photo shows David attempting to hit the golf ball into the hoop on the left. He missed it, and as you can see,

the president responded with OOOOOs and great body movement. The photograph published on the front page of the Rocky Mountain News, August 20, 1955, shows the event from the front taken by one of the photographers at the same time as mine, shutter speed 1/200 seconds. How often do you see that happening? And yes, that’s me in the middle, with my face in the camera.

In photographing most sporting events, there are many opportunities and several hours to attempt to capture the personalities and the sport of the game. But today’s golfing event was focused on quality time between the president and his grandson. You could hear, see, and feel their happiness.

The grandfather and grandson really enjoyed these precious moments.

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FISHING The sounds of nature continued, with the large blackbirds crowing overhead and the breeze whispering through the trees, a very quiet and peaceful, perfect day.

With fishing pole in hand, David was accompanied out to an old makeshift pier while the president was seated on the rocks about 125 feet away, surrounded by the working press observing, looking for opportunities for pictures. After a short time the president joined David, standing behind him on the old wooden pier. I moved to about 30 feet from the pier, facing them at a side angle. The president was quietly talking to David as the large trout—some 18 to 24 inches—were getting close to his bait, splashing below and ready to nibble. It was just the two of them on the pier with the Colorado Rockies and open sky behind them. Beautiful. I took one flash picture, and as I was changing film in the large (4 x 5 inch) press camera, their positions changed. The moment no longer existed.

I had been in the right place at the right time.

Several days later my photograph was published on the cover of our base weekly newspaper, Lowry Airmen. Comments from the photographers and the working press were: Congratulations, Great shot, Why didn’t we get it? My answer: I needed pictures, and I was looking. A copy was delivered to the president’s press office. Hagerty called and requested forty 11 x 14 inch prints for the president to distribute. I wonder who received them?

The photograph became a favorite of the president, his family, and White House staff, who told me I should ask for a copy autographed by the president. I did not believe that I was to be there when the photograph was signed, but as it happened arrangements were made. I appeared with super-shined shoes, a haircut, and a fresh khaki uniform, with picture in hand and with my Public Information Officer Major Jack Laurie. The door to the president’s office was open about 18 inches.

The military secretary called and said I was present. I knocked, and the president said, “Come in, Sergeant.” Prior to that knock I was Airman Second Class, but I was promoted to First Class on the spot!

I entered, I saluted, and I thanked the president.

As he glanced at the print his comment was, “It is a wonderful photo.” He then asked me how he should address it, and he wrote, “For Alfred Freni with best

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wishes Dwight Eisenhower.” I was nervous, excited, and thankful all at the same time.

Twenty-five years ago I received a call from a friend, who told me that David Eisenhower (now 46 years old) was to be at Hofstra College in Hempstead, Long Island, New York, on June 13, 1994. So now, after thirty-nine years, I could see him and talk about the day at Fraser, Colorado, and possibly get a picture signed. That morning I went through security and sat outside the room where David Eisenhower was attending a sit-down luncheon with about fifteen people.

As I waited, I was approached by a security guard, who asked me what I was there for. He was looking at my attaché, which contained letters and pictures inside. I showed him what I had and also the print that I brought, which I hoped to get signed. He took the picture inside and then came out empty-handed, no picture. A few moments later a woman came out with the print and said that David Eisenhower would like to meet me. And so, as I entered, David stood up, and then the entire group stood up. I said to myself, what have I done, I just wanted an autograph! I mentioned to David that I had some letters and photographs to show him and maybe someday I could . . . and he stopped me and said let’s do it now, so we did.

As David looked at the fishing photograph he said to me, “Mr. Freni, I have lived with this photo my entire life and never known who took it. It is an honor and a pleasure for me to meet you.” Here is the way he signed the photograph: “To Al Freni— who took my favorite picture—Best Wishes—David Eisenhower June 13, 1994.”

VACATION CUT SHORT The 1955 vacation was cut short. On September 24, Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. Everything changed. Doctor Paul Dudley White, a heart specialist from Boston, flew in to examine the president, and General Howard Snyder, the president’s White House physician, was constantly pressed about the president’s condition. From then on the press room was crowded, working 24/7. The phone calls never stopped, nor did the Q&A press releases.

The president did not return to Washington until November 11.

Yet for me, that Eisenhower vacation holds memories that have lasted all these years.

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As a young airman of just 22, Al Freni captured this famous image of President Eisenhower on a “perfect day” spent with his grandson David.

The photograph was published on the cover of Lowry Airmen, the weekly newspaper of his base, and became a favorite of both the president and David, and both later autographed copies for Freni.

Having carefully positioned himself about 30 feet from the president, where no other press photographers were standing, Freni was the only one to capture the moment, and later explained that he was in the right place at the right time.

COURTESY AL FRENI

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The Long Shadow of Jiujitsu in the EAST ROOM President Theodore Roosevelt Learns Self-Defense J O H N H U T T O N F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

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ALL PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST LIBRARIES

t h e w h i t e h o u s e wa s b u i lt not only as an office and residence but as a stage for the presidency. All the presidents have considered it more or less in that way, from President George Washington, the builder, who devised the Blue Room as an oval to serve the oval lineup of men callers who came very formally with appointments to pay him court once a week, to President Abraham Lincoln, who made use of a single window over the North Door from which to speak to large crowds that gathered to “serenade” him. The rooms inside have flowed with receptions for hundreds, where the presidents made very carefully planned entrances—that of Andrew Jackson enhanced by a halo of gilded stars pasted over the archway through which he passed into the East Room. Up to this time, however, none used the White House stage to greater advantage than Theodore Roosevelt.

His entertainments, his speeches, his horses, his special guests, all attracted national attention. But he attracted the most attention when he ventured into the world of jujitsu.

For many reasons, perhaps the notable victory of Japan over Russia in 1905, interest in this ancient art of self-defense had gained popular notice everywhere. Its grace and subtle effectiveness, yet with great physical strength, seemed to embody the spirit of the new Asian world power. Naval officers back from the Philippines and Asia during the Spanish-American War had observed, experienced, and gained respect for jujitsu, and they convinced the military schools of the army and navy to introduce it into their programs. It was not an enduringly successful effort, but the Naval Academy in Annapolis did commission the celebrated jujitsu judan, or blackbelt, Yamashita Yoshiaki to give instructions as an experiment to the cadets. The professor was not only the leading expert on jujitsu but a philosopher on its uses. He devoutly believed that jujitsu should be taught to white house history quarterly

opposite and right Yamashita Yoshiaki (seated top left) and his two demonstration assistants, including his wife, Yamashita Fude (seated top center), demonstrate jiujitsu selfdefense moves during their U.S. tour, which began in 1905.

all women. It was an era when women had begun moving about in public on their own, sometimes traveling, perhaps in business, and they needed some way to defend themselves from those who might harm them. The professor’s belief was that by learning jujitsu women no longer need fear being outside their homes.

Yamashita, a stately, athletic figure, sailed to the United States and was received as the famous man he already was in Asia. He traveled with his wife, Yamashita Fude, who had absorbed all the lessons of jujitsu and helped with his promotion of women in this martial art of self-defense. The two were accompanied by an male demonstration assistant. Their demonstrations

were received with overwhelming favor, so much so that President Roosevelt invited Yamashita to the White House, where he would teach and demonstrate his art in the East Room.

The stage was set. The old dance cloth of years gone by was laid on the new parquet floors. Gilt bentwood chairs, brought up from storage, were lined up for the numerous guests. The professor made several demonstrations, some bringing gasps from the audience. Then the president came forward. Roosevelt had some idea of what he was getting into and did his best, but he endured quite a beating.

He emerged with nothing but praise for the teacher and the art, not that it can be imagined he might respond much

otherwise. Roosevelt’s praise for jujitsu and his continued support helped create interest in martial arts throughout the country.

One feature, however, of the professor’s teachings, and one close to his heart, was self- defense for women. Some now forgotten remark the president made in social company demeaned the “weaker sex” as unable to address that which is the work of real men. But the remark was heard by Martha Wadsworth, a small red-headed winter socialite in Washington, and she took exception, determined to show the president of the United States he did not know what he was talking about.

A longtime enthusiast of jujitsu, and one who would become the first

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Theodore Roosevelt on JUJITSU:

ALAMY

wr itin g to his so n Kermit in February 2005, President Roosevelt described a jujitsu lesson: “I still box with Grant, who has now become the champion middle-weight wrestler of the United States. Yesterday afternoon we had Professor Yamashita up here to wrestle with Grant. It was very interesting, but of course jujitsu . . . is really meant for practice in killing or disabling our adversary. In consequence, Grant did not know what to do except to put Yamashita on his back, and Yamashita was perfectly content to be on his back. Inside of a minute Yamashita had choked Grant, and inside of two minutes more he got an elbow hold on him that would have enabled him to break his arm; so that there is no question but that he could have put Grant out. So far this made it evident that the jujitsu man could handle the ordinary wrestler. But Grant, in the actual wrestling and throwing was about as good as the Japanese, and he was so much stronger that he evidently hurt and wore out the Japanese.” In Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children, (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 116–17.

female black belt in the United States, Wadsworth and her husband, Herbert, wintered in a mansion they built on Dupont Circle and summered on a 2,000 acre farm in central New York.

She was an athlete, an accomplished horsewoman, and a devoted supporter of women’s rights. Through the Embassy of Japan in Washington she made contact with Professor Yamashita in Annapolis. He and Yamashita Fude agreed to come to Martha Wadsworth’s house and make a demonstration for women alone.

Wadsworth’s mission was well planned. She filled her guest list with women from the top level of society women, most of them young. When they entered her house they were directed upstairs to change into padded white pajamas that their hostess had prepared. When they descended they were directed to the ballroom, where the floors were padded. The probably rather wild event lasted several hours, with Madame Yamashita and the professor instructing and helping, always courteous and genteel.

The demonstration was a great success and filled the newspapers for a while. Roosevelt never commented upon it, as far as is known. His daughter Alice did not participate, but her friends, socialites, foreign ambassadors’ daughters, and the rest were there. The classes were continued for two years, as long as Professor Yamashita taught at the Naval Academy.

The president of the United States, who had little use for women’s rights at that time but endorsed both their rights in general and women’s suffrage within only a few years, was a bit put down

by Martha Wadsworth’s society school, but remained a good sport. Perhaps the whole thing turned his viewpoint.

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Martha Blow Wadsworth, who held a black belt in jujitsu, riding sidesaddle on the lawn of Ashantee, the Avon home she shared with her husband, Herbert Wadsworth. below

T O P : M I L N E L I B R A R Y, S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K A T G E N E S E O BOT TOM: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The ballroom at the Wadsworth mansion on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. , where Yamashita Fude held a womenonly demonstration of jujitsu for society women.

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The First Fan IN THE White House Iconic Moments with America’s Champions S T E WA R T D . M CL A U R I N

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“gentlemen start your engines,” a familiar command but one that made history on July 4, 1984, when it was broadcast by President Ronald Reagan from aboard Air Force One to start the Firecracker 400 at Daytona International Speedway.1 Not only would it be the day that Richard Petty would capture his historic two hundredth victory at Daytona, but it would also be the first time Air Force One would land behind the speedway in full view of the fans. Reagan began his career as a radio sports announcer, and the sports included car racing. So he felt at home behind the microphone that day at Daytona, where used his broadcasting talent to call some play-by-play. He was the first sitting president to attend a NASCAR race.

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Like Reagan, many presidents bring a lifelong love of sport with them to the White House. And like Reagan, every sitting president is in a sense the nation’s “first fan,” adding to the spectators’ excitement—and often making history—with a show of support. Whether it is throwing out the first pitch of the season or shaking the hands of the victors in the East Room after the final game, every moment of presidential enthusiasm for a matchup is newsworthy and reflects the passion the commander-in-chief shares with the nation for sports of every kind.

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The Alabama Crimson Tide poses on the South Portico with President Donald Trump while celebrating its NCAA championship, 2018. above and opposite bottom left

Ronald Reagan as a sportscaster with radio station WHO in the 1930s and behind the microphone at Daytona on July 4, 1984. He received a signed flag from Richard Petty who captured his two-hundredth victory during the race. opposite top and bottom right

Air Force One takes off from behind the Daytona International Speedway with President George W. Bush aboard, 2004. The president had attended the NASCAR Nextel Cup Daytona 500. The previous year Bush had welcomed the best drivers of the 2003 NASCAR season and their colorful cars to the White House.

PREVIOUSE SPREAD: WHITE HOUSE PHOTO / LEFT TO RIGHT: ALAMY / GETTY IMAGES

Gentlemen start your Engines!— Ronald Reagan

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T O P : A P I M A G E S / B O T T O M L E F T : G E T T Y I M A G E S / B O T T O M R I G H T : S T E P H E N JA F F E , A F P, G E T T Y I M A G E S

Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.— John F. Kennedy

L E F T : R I C H A R D N I X O N F O U N D AT I O N / R I G H T : G E T T Y I M A G E S

by saving the once-brutal game of football from eradication, President Theodore Roosevelt paved the way for his successors to make the most of it. High school and college yearbooks reveal that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Trump participated in the sport. All remained lifelong fans and during their presidencies, like more than a century of their counterparts, welcomed countless numbers of national champions to the White House. The Kennedy family were famous for playing touch football at their home in Hyannis Port.2

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CL OCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM/ GERALD FORD PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM / N E W Y O R K M I L I TA R Y A C A D E M Y

clockwise from opposite left

Future presidents play football: Richard M. Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald R. Ford, and Donald Trump (wearing number 8 in the second row) .

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Hey, there’s a Bears fan living in the White House!— Barack Obama in 1986 the tragic loss of the space shuttle Challenger forced the cancellation of President Reagan’s plans to welcome the Chicago Bears to the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl victory. Twenty-five years later the invitation was finally issued again by President Obama, who explained, “Shortly after I took office, someone at the NFL realized, ‘hey, there’s a Bears fan living in the White House!’”3 Like many Super Bowl champions before and since, the Bears presented the president with a team jersey and posed for a team photo (right).

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O B A M A : P H O T O B Y M A R K W I L S O N, G E T T Y I M A G E S / T R U M P : A P P H O T O , S U S A N WA L S H / B R O A D C A S T B O O T H : F R A N K M I C E L O T TA , G E T T Y I M A G E S C L I N T O N : A P P H O T O , W I L F R E D O L E E / B U S H : P H O T O B Y M A R K W I L S O N, G E T T Y I M A G E S / R E A G A N : R O N A L D R E A G A N P R E S I D E N T I A L M U S E U M A N D L I B R A R Y

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Lifelong football fans, former Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton join sports broadcasters James Brown, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, and Jimmy Johnson in the Fox broadcast booth ahead of Super Bowl XXXIX, in which the Patriots defeated the Eagles, 2005. counterclockwise from opposite top

Super Bowl champions visit the White House: Barack Obama with the Chicago Bears, 2011; George W. Bush with the Indianapolis Colts, 2007; William J. Clinton with the Dallas Cowboys, 1993; and Donald J. Trump with the New England Patriots, 2017.

It is tails. . . . May the best team win.— Ronald Reagan on january 20, 1985, Ronald Reagan became the first president to perform the Super Bowl coin toss. 4 With the game scheduled the same Sunday that he privately took the Oath of Office for his second term, Reagan did not travel to the match between the Miami Dolphins and the San Francisco 49ers but was shown on live TV at the White House as he flipped the coin that landed tails up. Reagan’s public Inauguration was held the next day in the Capitol Rotunda.

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It’s an incredible honor for us.— Damien Harris In 2018, ahead of the Crimson Tide’s seventh visit to the White House, Damien Harris, the team’s senior running back, explained that the team was honored by the invitation.5 For most college teams, the opportunity to meet the president comes much less frequently than it has for the Crimson Tide, but such invitations have become as much of a tradition as those made to professional teams. Among the earliest NCAA football champions to visit the White House was the University of Southern California, which called on President Herbert Hoover in 1931 (above).

right top and second rows

On November 17, 2017, President Donald Trump welcomed seventeen NCAA champion teams to the White House. Among the many sports and colleges represented were: Row 1: University of Oklahoma softball team; University of Virginia men’s tennis; West Virginia University rifle team; and McKendree University women’s bowling team.

Row 2: University of Washington women’s rowing team; Ohio State University men’s volleyball team; Texas A&M University women’s equestrian team; and University of Utah ski team.

right third and fourth rows

Row 3: Alabama’s CrimsonTide has claimed seventeen national championships between 1932 and 2018. Pictured are visits made to celebrate with President Clinton in 1993; with President Obama in 2012, 2013, and 2016; and with President Trump in 2018.

Row 4: The University of Connecticut Women’s basketball team won eleven national champion ships between 1995 and 2016. Pictured are visits to celebrate with President George W. Bush in 2002, and with President Obama in 2009, 2010, 2015, and 2016.

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A L L T R U M P P H O T O S : W H I T E H O U S E P H O T O B Y A N D R E A H A N K S / R O W 3 : FA R L E F T C L I N T O N P R E S I D E N T I A L L I B R A R Y A N D M U S E U M ; A L L O T H E R S A P P H O T O S ROW 4: CENTER: GETTY IMAGES; ALL OTHERS AP PHOTOS / OPPOSITE TOP LEFT: AP PHOTO

One of the great things about living here is that you don’t have to sign up for a baseball fantasy camp to meet your heroes.

It turns out, they come here.— George W. Bush

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C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T : A L A M Y / L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S / A P P H O T O , S U S A N WA L S H / A P P H O T O / N A T I O N A L A R C H I V E S A N D R E C O R D S A D M I N I S T R A T I O N / G E O R G E W. B U S H P R E S I D E N T I A L L I B R A R Y A N D M U S E U M

president george w. bush loves sports and held forty-eight events to honor teams and individual athletes during his eight years in office.6 A onetime owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Bush introduced children’s T-ball games on the White House lawn (below right). On October 30, 2001, in one of the most iconic moments in sports history, President Bush threw the ceremonial opening pitch at Yankee Stadium to open game 3 of the World Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees. Major League Baseball had been entirely suspended for six days following the attacks of 9/11, and it was Bush’s decision to wait to throw the traditional presidential ceremonial pitch of the World Series in New York rather than at game 1 in Arizona. After visiting with firefighters and first responders at Ground Zero, he wore an FDNY sweater to deliver the pitch (above right). The historic event is considered a moment of healing for the nation and was seen as a demonstration that life would go on.

white house history quarterly

above and left

Professional baseball champions have been welcomed to the White House since at least September 5, 1924, when the Washington Senators called on President Calvin Coolidge after winning the American League pennant.

Left: more recently, Ronald Reagan was given a jersey and baseball bat by the 1988 World Series champions the Los Angeles Dodgers in a Rose Garden ceremony.

President Clinton was presented with a team cap and shirt by the 1998 World Series champions, the New York Yankees, during a ceremony on the South Lawn.

left

O n Feb r ua r y 2 2 , 1 9 8 0 , President Jimmy Carter held an unusual dual White House reception for two champion teams from one city—Pittsburgh. The Pirates, were winners of the 1979 World Series and the Steelers were 1980 Super Bowl champions.

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I always root for the home team. And my home now is in Washington.— Richard Nixon

K E N N E D Y A N D N I X O N : A P P H O T O S / F O R D : F R E D R O S S , T O R O N T O S TA R V I A G E T T Y I M A G E S / C L I N T O N : A P P H O T O , N I C K WA S S / O B A M A : A P P H O T O / E VA N V U C C I

richard nixon, who has been ranked first on a list of presidential spectators,7 followed Washington sports enthusiastically as congressman, vice president, and eventually president. He often appeared in the stands and developed friendships with local coaches. He is seen entering his box, which bears a misspelled Presidential Seal, at RFK Stadium (right) for a game between the Senators and the Yankees in 1969. Like Nixon, most presidents have attended local matches—often seated behind the presidential seal as was John F. Kennedy in 1961 as he watched the Senators in the American League opening game (below).

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below

While President Nixon roots for his hometown Washington Redskins at RFK Stadium in a matchup with the Dallas Cowboys in 1969, it is possible that future president George H. W. Bush, a few seats to the right, is cheering for the Texas team.

above

Rather than miss a Washington Redskins game, Gerald Ford tunes in to the televised coverage while traveling in Canada, 1977.

below

President Clinton and New York Senator Patrick Moynihan watch a local hockey game as the Washington Capitals play the Buffalo Sabres during game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals at the MCI Center, 1998.

left

President Obama watches the Chicago Bulls play the Washington Wizards in a match between his two “hometown” basketball teams, 2009.

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As you come here to the Capital of your country, and to the first house of this land which belongs to all of you . . . the eyes of the entire Nation are upon you.— Lyndon B. Johnson

TOP: GET TY IMAGES / LBJ LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

in welcoming the U.S. Olympic team to the White House in 1968, Lyndon Johnson expressed gratitude for the team’s pursuit of excellence at the games.8 He shook hands with the athletes from the summer games in a receiving line (below). Earlier that year he congratulated Gold Medal figure skater Peggy Fleming, pinning a blossom from the Jackson Magnolia on her coat himself (right). Athletes representing the United States at the Olympics and in other international competitions have been welcomed at the White House individually and as teams for many decades.

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top and center left

The 1996 U.S. Olympic team fills the South Portico and its double stairs in a colorful photograph taken during a visit to the Clinton White House. Olympic medalists have often met individually with the president as well. In 1961, President Kennedy met in the Oval Office with Wilma Rudolph, winner of three Gold Medals in the 1960 games.

ALL IMAGES: GETTY IMAGES

center right and bottom left

In addition to the Olympians, competitors in a wide range of international sports are also often welcomed to the White House. President Hoover poses with members of the U.S. and Japanese Davis Cup teams during a May 26, 1929, visit, and Dennis Conner, skipper of the Stars & Stripes, presents America’s Cup to President Reagan following his team’s historic recapture of the prize from Australia, 1987.

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I believe with all my heart in athletics, in sport— Theodore Roosevelt

above and below

Theodore Roosevelt (above in 1905) loved vigorous outdoor sports including canoeing.

Like Roosevelt, President Reagan embraced many sports as a participant as well as a spectator. Following the first NCAA basketball championship in Georgetown University’s history, Reagan posed with Hoya star player Patrick Ewing for the cover of the November 1984 Sports Illustrated, in the Map Room of the White House.

above

In 1921, legendary baseball hero Babe Ruth visited Warren G. Harding in the White House, but he would also meet a future president on the baseball field. In 1948, Yale Baseball Captain George H. W. Bush accepted Ruth’s autobiography.

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B A B E R U T H : A L A M Y / R E A G A N M A R K R E I N S T E I N, G E T T Y I M A G E S / R O O S E V E LT : L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S

with his unqualified enthusiasm for sports of every kind Theodore Roosevelt (right, canoing) set the stage for many White House traditions to follow. While favorite sports vary from one president to the next, all have embraced and shared in the nation’s love of competition and pride in victory. Before, during, and after their White House years the presidents have served as the nation’s “first fan” whether as spectator, participant, or the first to congratulate a champion.

left

C A R T E R : E R I K L E S S E R , Z U M A P R E S S . C O M / E I S E N H O W E R : G E T T Y I M A G E S / F O R D : J O E M C N A L LY, G E T T Y I M A G E S / H O O V E R : O L E N C O L L E C T I O N , D I A M O N D I M A G E S , G E T T Y I M A G E S

A lifelong baseball fan, former President Carter, with his wife, Rosalynn, in 2010, can often be found in the stands during Atlanta Braves games. below

President Eisenhower’s passion for golf continued well into his retirement. In 1968, he played a round with President Johnson in Palm Springs, California.

below

Former New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio greets former President Hoover at Yankee Stadium, 1959.

above

In 2004, former President Ford posed with a 1930s-era football, the kind he used at the University of Michigan when he played center and linebacker for the Wolverines.

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For an account of the event, see “Start Your Engines: American Race Cars at the Reagan Library,” press release, May 16, 2011, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, www.reaganlibrary.com.

2. John F. Kennedy reportedly conveyed this aphorism to Pierre Salinger. William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary, new and expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 695.

3. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Welcoming the 1985 Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears,” October 7, 2011, online at https:// obamawhitehouse.archives.gov.

4. See the account and quotations in Dave Anderson, “Super Bowl XIX: Ceremony for the President and the King,” New York Times, January 21, 1985, C4.

5. Damien Harris, quoted in David Nakamura and Cindy Boren, “‘Roll Tide’: Alabama Football Team Visits Trump at the White House,” Washington Post, April 10, 2018.

7. Richard Nixon, quoted in Dave Anderson, “Nixon Pledges Allegiance to Redskins,” New York Times, January 2, 1973, 47. For Nixon as “first” on a list of presidential baseball spectators, see “President Richard Nixon Baseball Related Quotations,” Baseball Almanac, online at https://www.baseball-almanac.com. See also “President Nixon: ‘Baseball’s Number One Fan,’” posted June 11, 2014, Richard Nixon Foundation, online at https://www.nixonfoundation.org.

8. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks to Members of the Davis Cup Team,” January 15, 1964, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, November 22, 1963–June 30, 1964 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965), 1:107.

9. Theodore Roosevelt, “Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School, Groton, Mass.,” May 24, 1904, Presidential Addresses and State Papers, April 17 1904, to May 9, 1905, by Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Review of Reviews Company, 1910), 3:12.

6. George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President in Photo Opportunity with Members of the Baseball Hall of Fame, The East Room,” White House press release, March 30, 2001, online at https://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov.

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While flying by helicopter over the South Lawn of the White House and the Ellipse, President Kennedy likely got a glimpse of his staff playing baseball against members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff. Second from left to right are Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, congressional relations aide Richard Donahue, and special counsel to the president Ted Sorensen. The White House team lost 10 to 7.

BETTMANN / CONTRIBUTOR

notes 1.

NNe we!w !

Creating the Sweet World of

White House Desserts A PA S T RY C H E F’ S S E C R E T S Roland Mesnier with Mark Ramsdell

“I witnessed American history from the Whitean House ite House Pastry Shop for more than 25 years, chronicling whateIthan saw 25 in h I hadi flour and butter and sugar. only one goal in mind: pleasing the guest with a tailor-made dessert. Here are my secrets . . .”

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ith this step-by-step guide, artist John Hutton demonstrates that drawing is another form of looking. By following his unique four-step method, aspiring artists of all ages alike will enjoy creating portraits of every president from George Washington to Donald Trump—all that is needed is a pencil and eraser.

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T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

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PRESIDENTIAL SITES Quarterly Feature

From the Files of the NATIONAL SPORTING Library The Washington Riding and Hunt Club and Its Presidential Connections MAC KEITH GRISWOLD

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THE WASHINGTON RIDING AND HUNT CLUB Founded in the early 1900s and incorporated in November 1910, the Washington Riding and Hunt Club hosted elite riding, fox hunting, polo, horse shows, and other social gatherings for both men and women at the highest levels of Washington society. The club maintained a physical location at Twenty-Second and P Streets Northwest. Described in a 1925 club publication as “advantageously and ideally situated. . . on the bridle path midway between Rock Creek and Potomac Parks with their miles and miles of open woodland trail,” the club1 was housed in a building erected in 1888 for the Washington Riding Academy. It could accommodate 150 horses and had 13,000 square feet of space for carriage storage. The stable was in the basement, the riding ring was at street level, and the second floor held club and reception rooms as well as a kitchen and bathing rooms.2 In its heyday the club was part of the glue that held the two disparate parts of Washington, D.C., society together—the “cave dwellers,” a term used to describe Washington families who had lived in the

previous spread

The National Sporting Library and Museum is situated among the green hills of Middleburg, Virginia, the unofficial capital of mid-Atlantic horse country. below

A drawing from a 1925 newsletter for the Washington Riding and Hunt Club features the main club building located in Washington, D.C.

P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : G E T T Y I M A G E S / L E F T : N AT I O N A L S P O R T I N G L I B R A R Y A N D M U S E U M

l o c at e d j u s t a b o u t a n h o u r’ s d r i v e w e s t of the White House, nestled within the sprawling green hills and horse farms of Middleburg, Virginia, stands the National Sporting Library and Museum (NSLM). Founded as a library in 1954 by George L. Ohrstrom Sr. and Alexander Mackay-Smith with their own sporting book collections, the institution now hosts an expanded library and archive, a curatorship funded by Paul Mellon, a research facility, and an art museum with more than 20,000 books and works of art in its collection. Middleburg, known today as “The Nation’s Horse and Hunt Capital,” was established in 1787 as the halfway point between Alexandria and Winchester, Virginia, along the old Ashby’s Gap trading route, what is today known as Route 50. The charming town serves as a popular weekend retreat for many Washingtonians.

Among the “all things horse and hound” collections of the NSLM are the records of the Washington Riding and Hunt Club, which provide a window on a time when equestrian sports were an integral part of life in the Nation’s capital, including that of the first family.

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right

Mrs. Howard, a member of the club, and several companions were photographed while out riding in the streets of Washington, D.C. below

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A unknown man jumps his horse in the arena at the Washington Riding and Hunt Club building at TwentySecond and P Streets Northwest.

Spectators can be seen in the top left corner of the photograph.

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city for several generations, and those who came to the city to serve briefly in government but would not have dreamed of a life without horses. At the time the club was founded the world was changing very fast. The Wright brothers had first flown in Kitty Hawk in 1903, and in 1916 the first tanks, manned by British soldiers, rumbled across the battlefield at the Somme, where, a decade earlier, the calvary would have been sent. Soon the horse would be used only for sport and pleasure, in a world those gentlemen who formed their club in 1910 probably could not have imagined.

MEMBERSHIP AND ACTIVITIES

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The Washington Riding and Hunt Club hosted horse and hound activities for both men and women, aged young and old. Above, Ruth Hanna McCormick rides with her two children, Katrina and John, at horse show in January or February 1923.

Below, President William Howard Taft, who was known to ride with the club, was photographed riding with General Clarence Edwards, c. 1 909.

white house history quarterly

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The Washington Riding and Hunt Club’s membership consisted of both settled and temporary residents of the District of Columbia. Among its prestigious early members were President William Howard Taft, who was ironically the first president to favor the automobile over the horse while in office; Montgomery Blair Jr., son of Lincoln’s postmaster general; Gist Blair, the last private owner of what is today Blair House, The President’s Guest House; Admiral Cary T. Grayson, President Woodrow Wilson’s physician; William C. Eustis, founder of the Corcoran Museum of Art; Herbert and Martha Wadsworth, a couple from upstate New York who famously hosted jujitsu lessons in their ballroom; and Larz Anderson, a U.S. ambassador to Japan whose Gilded Age mansion now serves as the headquarters for the Society of the Cincinnati in Washington, D.C. The U.S. president, chief justice of the Supreme Court, admiral of the navy, and chief of staff of the army were all honorary members.

Two first ladies, Grace Coolidge and Lou Hoover, presided as honorary chairs of the club’s horse shows in 1928 and 1930 respectively. These glittering affairs—the most important events of the club’s annual calendar— featured such prizes as a bracelet donated by Julius Garfinckel, founder of the Washington department store. Dashing riders like Peter A. Jay, a diplomat directly descended from the nation’s first chief justice, rode in the open jumping class, probably clearing well over 4 feet.

Young women making their society debuts in 1928, including Cornelia Széchenyi, great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, competed in a saddle class for the “Best Débutante Rider.”3 The levels of skill displayed at these shows ranged from expert cavalry drills to family classes (teaching the

the club in Rock Creek park for “fox chases up the creek valley.”4 The varied activities in the records of the NSLM include fox hunts and drag hunts, in which the hounds chased a bag of anise after foxes became less numerous in the city. Peaceful Sunday rides through Rock Creek Park, polo tournaments with an annual polo ball sponsored by the War Department Polo Association, and even an exhibition of watercolors were also among the featured events.

THE END OF THE HUNT CLUB Members clearly enjoyed themselves during the halcyon days of the club’s existence, but when the Great Depression hit Washington in the 1930s it was one of the many elite social clubs that disappeared. The building was demolished in 1936 and replaced with a service station.5 Although disbanded, the club’s legacy lives on at the National Sporting Library and Museum, where foxes still roam and researchers and enthusiasts can learn more about this organization and others like it.

NOTES 1.

Washington Riding and Hunt Club publication 1925, National Sporting Library and Museum Archives, Middleburg, Va.

2. James M. Goode, Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington’s Destroyed Buildings (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 267.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Washington Riding and Hunt Club member Mary Parker Corning, the daughter of Representative Parker Corning of New York, posed with “Red” and “Joy,” her favorite Thoroughbreds, at the opening of the Washington Horse Show on April 21, 1927.

young to ride was very important to the club members). There was also a “Musical Stalls” competition that was just like musical chairs but on horseback.

It was not all about the horses: at dinners or midnight suppers after a ball members chowed down on clear green turtle soup, guinea hen en casserole, and a mysterious dessert named “Hunter’s Ice cream.” From the club house to the Chevy Chase Hunt Club along Fifteenth Street and New York Avenue, special trolley cars transported revelers in their ball gowns and “pink coats”(special scarlet tails members wore). Membership fees included various levels: $100 for active members; $25 for the military; $1000 for life members; and $5,000 to watch the horseshow events from an opera box above the tanbark.

Sport also included moonlight rides, which began at the corner of the State Department Building and steeplechasing, also known as pointto-point racing, which still remains highly favored in surrounding Virginia and Maryland today. In the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt joined

3. Society Horse Show Programs, January 6, 1928, and March 1, 1930. See also “Julius Garfinkel Dies in Washington: Merchant and Philanthropist Succumbs to Pneumonia in the Capital at 62,” New York Times, November 7, 1936, 17.

4. Mark Walton, “Sex and Race,” Bethesda Magazine, May–June 2013, online at bethesdamagazine.com.

5. Goode, Capital Losses, 267.

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REFLECTIONS

My William White Seale House Our Founding Editor History Hero STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

THISinISSUE MARKS Now its fifty-fifth issue,THE WhiteFIFTYHouse FIFTH Quarterly NUMBERwas OFfirst White House History published History For many years it was in 1983,Quarterly. and entered regular publicaa semi-annual publication. tion semi-annually in 1997. InHowever, 2015, the for the pastwas fiveincreased years, thetoWhite House frequency quarterly to Historical published it share even Association more storieshas of White House quarterly to share even more stories of history.

White House history. the Association Since its beginning, beginning, the Association has Since been its fortunate to have the superb has beenguidance fortunateand to have the superb editorial amazing historeditorial guidance ical knowledge of and Dr. amazing William historSeale, ical founding knowledge of Dr. William Seale, the editor of this publication, the founding editor of this publication, who continues to oversee the content who continues to oversee the content of each issue today.

In addition to this of eachhe issue In addition to this work, hastoday. written twenty-seven work, on hetopics has related writtentotwenty-seven books the history of books on topics related to the history of the White House, historic landscapes, the White House, historicand landscapes, state capitols, diplomacy, historic state capitols, diplomacy, and historic preservation. preservation.

I am not aware of any other histoam not of anyand other historianIwith suchaware command in-depth rian with such and in-depth knowledge of command history specific to the knowledge the White Houseofashistory Williamspecific Seale. Dr.toSeale White House as William Seale. Dr. Seale has pioneered the scholarly study of has pioneered the scholarly of White House architectural andstudy human White House architectural human history for more than fortyand years.

His history forincludes more than forty years. His work also the groundbreaking work also includes the groundbreaking two-volume President’s House and the two-volumeand President’s House of and the restoration interpretation more restoration of more than twenty and stateinterpretation capitols and important than twenty state capitols and important American landmarks.

American landmarks.

“History teaches perspective,” Dr. “History teaches perspective,” Seale has said.

“In the avalancheDr. of Seale has “In the avalanche of words that said. rush over us now from the

printedthat words pagerush and over television, us now perspective from the printed is important. page and . . . television, You’ve gotperspective to be able is important. to judge to live. in . . aYou’ve free society. got to History be able to judge helps with to your live in thinking. a free society.

And three-diHistory helps with your mensional history, thinking. houses, Andetc., three-dihelps mensional with that all-important history, houses, and life-enrichetc., helps withhistorical ing that all-important imagination.” andThrough life-enrichhis ing historical writing and restoration imagination.” work, Through Seale has his writing and restoration transformed structures into work, stories Sealewith has transformed an energy thatstructures makes history into stories and culture with an energy come alive. that Hismakes unique history multifaceted and culture apcome alive. His unique proach—engaging biography, multifaceted architecapproach—engaging ture, landscape, andbiography, cultural context—is architecture, of hislandscape, own fashioning. and cultural context—is of his Because own fashioning. of William Seale we know howBecause George of Washington William Seale camewe to know meet howIrish the George architect Washington James Hoban cameand to meethethe why chose Irish him architect to build James the President’s Hoban and why hefinest House—the chosestone himhouse to build in eighthe President’s House—the teenth-century America. We finest know stone not

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house inAquia eighteenth-century just that sandstone fromAmerica.

Virginia We know Aquia sandstone was used not but just howthat it was quarried and from Virginia used but how it was poled 45 miles was upstream to the building quarried and poled 45 miles upstream site.

We know not just that roses emto the building site. We know not just bellish the fine stonework on the White that roses the“Double fine stonework House but embellish that they are Scottish on the White House but thatsymbol they are Roses,” the newly cultivated of “Double Scottish Roses,” the newly culnational pride to the Scottish stonemativated symbol national pride to the sons who carvedofthem.

Scottish stonemasons carved them.

Because of Williamwho Seale, the rusted oflay William Seale, ironBecause gates that discarded inthe therusted weeds ironthe gates that of laythe discarded in the on shores Potomac for weeds half a on the shores of the Potomac half a century were identified as thosefor installed century wereHouse identified as those installed at the White

by James Monroe in at theToday Whitethey House James Monroe in 1818. areby preserved on public 1818. Today they are preserved on public display on the grounds of the American display on the grounds American Horticultural Society of inthe Alexandria, Horticultural Society in Alexandria, Virginia.

Because of William Seale, Virginia.

Because of William Seale, the collection of iconic photographs by the collection iconic photographs by Abbie Rowe of documenting President Abbie S. Rowe documenting President Harry Truman’s White House renoHarry S. Truman’s White renovation was extracted fromHouse a dustbin to vation was extractedbyfrom a dustbin to be widely published the White House be widely published by the White House Historical Association.

Historical The listAssociation. of William Seale’s discoverThehave list ofadded William Seale’s discoveries that to the public underies that have added to the public understanding of the historic White House— standing of the historictoo White the People’s House—is longHouse— for this the People’s tooowes longtremenfor this column.

ThisHouse—is organization column.

This organization owes tremendous gratitude to him for his dedication, dous gratitude to him for his dedication, his commitment, his knowledge, and his his commitment, and his friendship. friendship.

WH H II T TE E H HO OU US SE E H H II S ST TO OR R II C CA AL L A AS SS SO OC C II A AT T II O ON N W

STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

RONALD REAGAN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

“These stones are soaked with the history of human experience,” historian William Seale observed while presenting his new book, The President’s House, to President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan in an East Room ceremony, October 16, 1986.

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

WHITEHOUSE HOUSEHISTORY HISTORYQUARTERLY QUARTERLY WHITE featuresarticles articleson onthe thehistoric historicWhite WhiteHouse, House,especially espefeatures cially relating to the building itself life asthere livedthrough there the relating to the building itself and lifeand as lived through years.

The views thetheirs authors years.

Thethe views presented by presented the authorsbyare and do not are theirs and do not necessarily reflectof the position or necessarily reflect the position or policy the White House policy of the White House Historical Association.

Historical Association.

front cover: President Ronald Reagan poses in the Oval Office with a football signed by the University of Southern

the white house historical California football team, 1982.

[Ronald Reagan Presidential association

Library] was chartered on November 3, 1961, to enhance understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the back cover: Clockwise fromfrom top left: Carter jogs on historic White House.

Income the Jimmy sale of White the South Drive Quarterly of the White House, Ronald Reagan House History and all the1978; Association’s books practices shooting a hockey puck with the Washington Capitals and guides is returned to the publications program and in the Rose Garden, 1983; Barackhistorical Obama plays basketball is used as well to acquire furnishings andon the White House court, 2010; George W. Bush pitches horseshoes, 1988; memorabilia for the White House.

Richard Nixon bowls in the White House lanes, 1971; Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford participate in a golf tournament, 1995; Harry S. address inquiries to: Truman swims in Key West, 1951; Francklin D. Roosevelt sails in White House Historical Association, the Amberjack II, 1933; and Theodore Roosevelt guides his horse P.O. Box 27624 in a jump, 1902. [Reagan: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library; Washington, D.C. 20038 Obama: White House Photo; All others: Getty Images] books@whha.org

the white house historical association

© Copyright by the White House was chartered2019 on November 3, 1961, toHistorical enhance understanding, Association.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication appreciation, and enjoyment of the historic White House. may be from reproduced, in a House retrieval system,Quarterly or Income the salestored of White History transmitted, in any form books or by any and all the Association’s andmeans, guideselectronic, is returned to the mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, publications program and is used as well to acquire historical without prior written permission White House furnishings and memorabilia for of thethe White House.

Historical Association.

address inquiries to: issn: 2639-9822

White House Historical Association, P.O. Box 27624 Washington, D.C. 20038 books@whha.org © Copyright 2019 by the White House Historical Association. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the White House Historical Association.

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In this issue of White House History Quarterly we look at the significance of sports in the lives of the U.S. presidents. Before, during, and after their White House years, presidents have been enthusiastic participants and devoted spectators of athletic competitions of all kinds, as this group of photographs reflects. Clockwise from top left: Jimmy Carter jogs on the South Drive of the White House, 1978; Ronald Reagan practices shooting a hockey puck with the Washington Capitals in the Rose Garden, 1983; Barack Obama throws hoops on the White House basketball court, 2010; George W. Bush pitches horseshoes, 1988; Richard Nixon bowls in the White House lanes, 1971; Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford participate in a golf tournament, 1995; Harry S. Truman swims in Key West, 1951; Francklin D. Roosevelt sails in the Amberjack II, 1933; and Theodore Roosevelt guides his horse in a jump, 1902.