III Olympiad: St. Louis 1904, Athens 1906

THE OLYMPIC CENTURY

THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MODERN OLYMPIC MOVEMENT

VOLUME 4

THE

III OLYMPIAD

ST. LOUIS 1904

ATHENS 1906

by Carl A. Posey

W

Warwick Press Inc.

Toronto

Copyright © 1996 WSRP

The Olympic Century series was produced as a joint effort among the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, and World Sport Research & Publications, to provide an official continuity series that will serve as a permanent on-line Olympic education program for individuals, schools, and public libraries.

Published by:

Warwick Press Inc., Toronto

www.olympicbooks.com

1st Century Project: Charles Gary Allison

Publishers: Robert G. Rossi, Jim Williamson, Rona Wooley

Editors: Christian D. Kinney, Laura Forman

Art Director: Christopher M. Register

Picture Editors: Lisa Bruno, Debora Lemmons

Digital Imaging: Richard P. Majeske

Associate Editor, Research: Mark Brewin

Associate Editor, Appendix: Elsa Ramirez

Designers: Kimberley Davison, Diane Myers, Chris Conlee

Staff Researchers: Brad Haynes, Alexandra Hesse, Pauline Ploquin

Copy Editor: Harry Endrulat

Venue Map Artist: Dave Hader, Studio Conceptions, Toronto

Fact Verification: Carl and Liselott Diem Archives of the German Sport University at Cologne, Germany

Statistics: Bill Mallon, Walter Teutenberg

Memorabilia Consultants: Manfred Bergman, James D. Greensfelder, John P. Kelly, James B. Lally, Ingrid O’Neil

Office Staff: Diana Fakiola, Brian M. Heath, Edward J. Messier, Brian P. Rand, Robert S. Vassallo, Chris Waters

Senior Consultant: Dr. Dietrich Quanz (Germany)

Special Consultants: Walter Borgers, Dr. Karl Lennartz, Dr. Dietrich Quanz, Dr. Norbert Mueller (Germany), Ian Buchanan (United Kingdom), Wolf Lyberg (Sweden), Dr. Nicholas Yalouris (Greece).

International Contributors: Jean Durry (France), Dr. Fernand Landry (Canada), Dr. Antonio Lombardo (Italy), Dr. John A. MacAloon (U.S.A.), Dr. Jujiro Narita (Japan), C. Robert Paul (U.S.A.), Dr. Roland Renson (Belgium), Anthony Th. Bijkirk (Netherlands), Dr. James Walston (Ombudsman)

International Research and Assistance: John S. Baick (New York), Matthieu Brocart (Paris), Alexander Fakiolas (Athens), Bob Miyakawa (Tokyo), Rona Lester (London), Dominic LoTempio (Columbia), George Kostas Mazareas (Boston), Georgia McDonald (Colorado Springs), Wendy Nolan (Princeton), Alexander Ratner (Moscow), Jon Simon (Washington, D.C.), Frank Strasser (Cologne), Valéry Turco (Lausanne), Laura Walden (Rome), Jorge Zocchi (Mexico City)

All rights reserved. No part of The Olympic Century book series may be copied, republished, stored in a retrieval system, or otherwise reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior written consent of the IOC, the USOC, and WSRP.

eBook Conversion: eBook Partnership, United Kingdom

ISBN (24 Volume Series) 978-1-987944-24-2

ISBN (Volume 4) 978-1-987944-03-7

CONTENTS

I

A Savage Race

II

Summer Heroes

III

Saving the Olympic Dream

IV

Athens Pilgrimage

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Photo Credits

Bibliography

Index

A SAVAGE RACE

ST. LOUIS 1904

The old Apache warrior leaned against the white wooden railing, his face, wrinkled into leather by the winds of fortune and the southwestern desert, impassive, except for a glint of hatred still visible in his bright, birdlike eyes. Even in his white man’s costume, having tried to walk the white man’s road, he remained the aging fighter, even to the bow and arrow he carried. His Native American name was Goyathlay—One Who Yawns. But to the multitude around him, he had long been famous as Geronimo.

Like that multitude, he had come to St. Louis for the world’s fair—formally, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, commemorating the first centennial of America’s acquisition of about a third of its area from France in 1803. Geronimo was one of the attractions, allowed by the War Department to attend such events and sell what would be called photo opportunities today. Usually he could be found at an Indian industrial school exhibit, waving a ceremonial gourd-rattle in time to a drum and selling preprinted autographs for a dime.

His old animosity toward the white race is entirely gone, sneered one local journalist. Long residence in prison has improved his manners. He is not the caged eagle, drooping in melancholy dejection, nor is he like the chieftains of romance who ‘never smiled again.’ Geronimo smiles all the time: he is moved to such high spirits that he grins; and the more dimes he gets the more he grins.

For someone who’d become an Apache warrior in 1846 and who had spent several decades building a reputation as a truly dangerous man, it was not much of a job. But it was better than waiting for death beneath the barred windows of his concrete-block dwelling down in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he had only memories and a rug woven from his enemies’ scalps to keep him company. At age 76, he understood that one did not have to like one’s destiny—one had only to accept and endure it. If that meant being trotted out for tourist photographs at expositions, so be it. He’d learned 50 years earlier that there was no escaping the white man’s cruel folly. He could even grin.

Below: Geronimo, a former chief of the Chiricahua Apache tribe of southeastern Arizona, was a living relic of America’s frontier days. Captured in Mexico in 1886 after leading a 10-year guerrilla war against the U.S. government, he was imprisoned in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, from which he was granted leave to take part in a Native American school exhibition at the St. Louis world’s fair.

Still, Geronimo must have been struck by this latest evidence of that trait in his eternal enemy. Out there on the playing field was every manner and shade of man except a white one, engaged in athletic contests none of them had ever experienced before. Some of the competitors were Native Americans, who showed they could still move swiftly, although perhaps not so swiftly as he had down in the Sonora Desert in the old days—of course, these boys had no cavalry after them. But they had done all right, he supposed. The Sioux had distinguished themselves, as had the Chippewa, Crow, and Pawnee.

Below: Archery competition during Anthropology Days, St. Louis 1904

Beyond that, it was all as incomprehensible as a dream. Tiny black men called pygmies staged a clay-ball fight, Negritos from across the Pacific shinnied up a 50-foot pole, and giants from Patagonia showed they weren’t as strong as they looked. Geronimo left no record of his thoughts on that August day in 1904, but it may have crossed his mind that those boys’ jobs were not much better than his own - worse, really. There was no way his brothers could excel in these white man’s games, and he may have suspected that was the point of all this show, to verify the inferiority of uncivilized people. At this, the old eyes would have glittered like the raven’s. It was better to lose your scalp in battle.

The tableau spread in and around Francis Field was the first of two so-called Anthropology Days, in which the diverse primitive peoples summoned to the great fair competed for small prizes. That they were in St. Louis at all was the work of the exposition’s Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, and its director, Dr. William John McGee, a geologist and archaeologist of some renown, and former director of the government’s Bureau of American Ethnology.

That these savages were set to competing athletically, however, was the work of doughty, self-made James E. Sullivan, director of the exposition’s Department of Physical Culture, and longtime leader of the nation’s preeminent sports body, the Amateur Athletic Union, or AAU. Many thought Sullivan was something of a savage himself; at the very least, he was unusually plain spoken in the world of international sport, with its diplomatic obliquities.

Sullivan was often called the tsar of amateur eminence—sometimes one saw his big fist in plain view, but more often than not it was his hand invisibly on some athletic tiller, steering events in much the same way he’d steered the tribesmen to compete in the Anthropology Days.

Born in November 1861, the son of an Irish railroad foreman and his wife, Sullivan had grown up poor but vigorous, a good-sized man by the standards of the day (5 foot 10 [1.78 meters], 155 pounds [70.31 kilograms]), drawn to every kind of physical activity as powerfully as he was repelled by the idea of spending his life as a laborer. Finishing public school at 16, Sullivan had sharpened his knowledge through night school and voracious reading; by 1878, the young comer entered the world of editing and publishing, which was to become a parallel lifetime occupation to sports administration.

As a member of New York’s Pastime Athletic Club, he excelled in half a dozen sports, from boxing to distance running, but favored track and field, where he displayed the kind of versatility seen in today’s decathletes. But Sullivan was not just an athlete—he was an athlete with a mission.

In the late 19th century, amateur sport in the United States was governed by the National Association of Amateur Athletes of America, or N4A, abetted by such conclaves of the wealthy as the Manhattan Athletic Club and New York Athletic Club. The latter group, dismayed by the transparent sham of amateurism as defined by the N4A, bolted in 1886 and, in late January of 1888, established a new organization: the Amateur Athletic Union. Defections from the N4A swiftly followed, including that of its vice president, James E. Sullivan, then 26. He became the AAU’s first secretary and, effectively, the arbiter of amateur sport in the United States.

Sullivan and the AAU patterned American amateurism on the British model, which had evolved, like so much of English society, along class-conscious, elitist standards that prevented any contamination by professionals—gentlemen didn’t do sports for money. In fact, it echoed the Olympic ideal later espoused by the International Olympic Committee and was as strictly enforced. Sullivan didn’t blink when he disqualified amateur athletes who accepted money for anything linked to sports, even when the sport was not their own. Out they went.

He saw to the exile of such runners as Bernie Wefers, the world’s fastest sprinter, for not registering with the AAU, and Harry Gill, later the Northwestern University track coach, for coaching for money. He suspended an unregistered water polo team in 1902 and track star George Foster Sanford, who’d taken money to coach football. He would help destroy the great Jim Thorpe, and Arthur Duffey and even his own nephew, Timothy Sullivan, who’d played in a basketball game that, in his uncle’s eyes, wasn’t purely amateur. We must have law and order, he would tell friends as he disqualified them.

The AAU initially hadn’t shown any interest in the Olympic revival and absented itself from involvement in the first modern Games at Athens 1896. The American team had been organized by William Milligan Sloane, a Princeton professor and IOC member who had been the U.S. representative at Olympic affairs since the IOC’s formation in 1894. American success at Athens had brought a change in attitude within the ranks of the AAU, Sullivan included, who graciously offered to take a leading role in the formation of an American team for the next Games, scheduled for Paris in 1900. In fact, Sullivan was the American official who had accompanied the squad to Paris. He further enhanced his resume by being named athletic director at the next year’s Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo—an event remembered less for its athletic competitions than for being the site of President William McKinley’s assassination. Sullivan was the natural choice to direct the sporting events of the St. Louis fair.

Below: James E. Sullivan, secretary of the American Amateur Athletic Union, used his position as a national sports official to carve out a niche as an athletic event promoter. He had organized national sports festivals at Chicago, Illinois, and Buffalo, New York, before being put in charge of the sports events at the St. Louis world’s fair.

Of course, he had his detractors. Sullivan is a ghetto-poor Irish-American, wrote William Milligan Sloane, a man whose great faults are those of his birth and breeding, but he is unfortunately a representative man and holds the organized athletes of the clubs in the hollow of his hand.

In arranging" the contests of Anthropology Days, however, Sullivan had drawn as much from his experience as a journalist and publicist as from his athletic background. Sullivan’s intention was not merely to stage a track meet among the primitive people on exhibit at the exposition—he wanted to grab the attention of the press and public, and turn them toward what he regarded as the centerpiece of the fair: the third Olympic Games of the modern Olympic movement.

France’s baron Pierre de Coubertin and his colleagues on the IOC had successfully revived the ancient Games less than a decade before the St. Louis fair, at Athens in 1896. The second Olympic Games had played out against the turn of the 19th century, at the Universal Exposition of 1900 in Paris, where the Games had been utterly subsumed into the larger show. Indeed, the Paris experience had led James E. Sullivan and a handful of other rebellion-minded sports leaders to form an international union that would displace the IOC—an effort that withered in the light of publicity.

Now, the Games were once again being subsumed into a larger spectacle, an athletic detail against the vast background of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. To many, the St. Louis contests would be no more a real Olympic Games than the 1900 Games had been.

And yet, these first Olympic Games in the New World would produce a profound and permanent result, shaping every Olympic Games to come. Despite a strong American showing at the Athens Games and several dominating performances at Paris, most people had little sense of what the Olympic Games were, or why they were revived, and even fewer had ever heard of Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Such keen interest as America had in the Olympic movement hadn’t spread very far from the eastern athletic clubs and universities that had produced most of the American Olympians—indeed, it had not crossed the Appalachians. St. Louis would change that.

Although the Games themselves were nearly lost in the glare of the larger show and drew a meager lineup of foreign athletes, they brought the modern Olympic revival into tie American consciousness—along with the sharp awareness that the United States must have a starring role in it. An entrepreneur today might say that St. Louis validated the Olympic brand in the United States. Thus, in a curious irony, James E. Sullivan, the zealous enforcer of amateurism, helped lay the foundation of a sports apparatus that, by century’s end, could openly pay an athlete a million dollars for 10 seconds of hard labor in the right kind of shoes.

The United States, not much more man a century old in 1904, was unusually receptive to notions of astronomical success. Only six years earlier, the nation had defeated Spain to become, in a small way, an imperial power, winning Guam and Puerto Rico and the option to buy the teeming and mysterious Philippines for just $20 million—as it happened, about $5 million more than the purchase being celebrated at the St. Louis fair. The sitting president, Theodore Roosevelt, and his Rough Riders had become part of the mythology of the victory over Spain, and he was almost certain of reelection in 1904. For one thing, he’d made sure that more empire was on the way. A treaty with Panama had established the Canal Zone, and a legion of workers was already digging the big ditch abandoned in 1889 by the French.

One could find strife abroad—the Japanese had ambushed Russia’s Port Arthur, igniting a naval war the Tsar would not be able to win, and the great powers of Europe grew yearly more polarized. But all was harmony in the United States. Well, almost all; 1904 had been the year without a baseball World Series. John McGraw hadn’t let his New York Giants play Boston’s Red Stockings.

On the whole, these were the best of times. The American spirit soared when it heard George M. Cohan, then on Broadway, sing Yankee Doodle Boy and Give My Regards to Broadway, and all across the land people were humming a new tune from Andrew Sterling and Kerry Mills: Meet Me in St. Louie, Louie. Meet me at the Fair. In such an atmosphere, it would have been unthinkable to stage the Games of the III Olympiad anywhere else.

But, not very long before, it had been just as unthinkable to locate the Games on the banks of the muddy Mississippi. The change came about almost by accident and by a great city’s fainthearted default in favor of its chief rival.

Below: Pierre de Coubertin and his colleagues on the IOC supplied the ideological framework for the revival of the Olympic Games but failed to establish a blueprint for their organization, even after having staged two festivals. Coubertin’s ability to guide the Olympic movement had already come into question by American sports officials whose most vocal leader was James E. Sullivan.

Even before the pioneering Olympic Games got underway in Athens in 1896, the IOC had already set an itinerary for the first three modern Olympiads. Baron Pierre de Coubertin had deferred to Athens for the inaugural set of Games, accepting an offer from the Greeks to use the Olympic revival as part of a national celebration of 75 years of Greek independence from Ottoman rule. Paris would serve as host of the second installment. And to ensure that the Olympic Games wouldn’t be construed as a purely European affair, the baron and his colleagues voted to hold the third Games in North America, the city to be determined later. Implicit in the decision was that only a major American city, New York, perhaps, or Philadelphia, or even Chicago, was worthy of the honor. St. Louis wasn’t a consideration; it was too busy orchestrating the centennial celebration of the Louisiana Purchase scheduled for 1903.

Philadelphia made the first American pitch for the 1904 Games in 1899, propelled by the University of Pennsylvania, the preeminent collegiate power in track and field. By the time the Paris Games had ended, in October 1900, the City of Brotherly Love seemed a sure thing—of course, there has never been, before or since, a sure thing when it came to the selection of Olympic host cities.

In fact, the Philadelphia bid proved less than serious. Henri Bréal, secretary of the Paris-based Franco-American Committee, was interested in holding the Games in Chicago. When he learned of Philadelphia’s alleged maneuvering, he quickly got in touch with Henry J. Furber Jr., a prominent Chicago lawyer, urging some sort of counterstroke. Furber’s response is lost to history—most of his papers were destroyed upon his death. But Philadelphia’s Olympic interest suddenly evaporated almost without a trace, and Chicago’s materialized in its place— but only tacitly; the Windy City had yet to make an official proposal.

Meanwhile, the idea of holding the 1904 Games in New York enjoyed a brief vogue. Advanced by the American sporting establishment, which had gravitated to New York, this possibility immediately took root. In November 1900, the baron announced that, after consulting with the IOC members, he believed the 1904 Games would indeed take place in the United States, either in New York or Chicago.

At this, a sleeping dragon stirred and fixed a baleful eye on the father of the modern Olympics. The Baron de Coubertin or his associates have no longer any power to name the place at which Olympian Games or international athletic events of any character shall be held, grumbled James E. Sullivan, who was then trying to organize a competing international body. If that plan went forward, he continued, Chicago and New York will not be considered for the first gathering in the United States, as Buffalo, where the Pan-American Exhibition is to take place next year, has a prior bid for the honor of holding the games, and will undoubtedly be selected by the A.A.U.

Below: Turn-of-the-century Chicago displays the development that made it one of the most dynamic cities in the United States. Chicago had put itself on the world map by hosting the Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Coubertin was shocked. From Sullivan’s violent interview and most unusual and surprising remarks, he wrote, I learned that 1/ The Olympic Committee did not exist anymore, 2/ That I had nothing to do with sports anymore, 3/ An international Union had been founded in Paris in 1900 by M. Sullivan for the United States, by de Saint-Clair and Pierre Roy for France, Lieutenant Bergh for Sweden, etc… 4/ That the Olympic games would take place in 1901 in Buffalo amidst the Pan-American Exhibit of which M. Sullivan was the Steward. The baron would remember that Sullivan’s outburst had caused some mirth in Europe, and that a New York newspaper published a list of IOC members with the comment: "The freezing horror of the situation