Prologue: Crafting Patriotism – America at the Olympic Games

Abstract

The United States has long been near the centre of two major developments in the history of the modern world: the rise and triumph of the nation and the evolution and spread of sport. In the United States sport and nationalism have long been intertwined. [1] In the revolutionary ferment of 1776 that gave birth to the new nation, founding father John Adams commanded his callow countrymen to celebrate future anniversaries of Declaration of Independence with, among other grand ceremonies, ‘games’ and ‘sports’. [2] The use of sport to define a variety of national identities and the feverish quest to construct national pastimes that differed from the games of their former colonial overlords in Great Britain litter the early history of the United States. In prize fights, yacht races and pedestrian spectacles, American athletes sought to uphold their new nation’s pride and reputation against the former motherland – of sport and of much of the rest of American national culture. In baseball and American football, the United States constructed nationalistic alternatives to the spreading menace of British cricket and British varieties of football. [3] As the twentieth century loomed, the United States was already well-practised in crafting patriotism on playing fields. A tradition of engaging in international competitions and interpreting the results of those clashes as markers of national status had been firmly laid down. Americans celebrated nationalism not only in Independence Day sports and games as John Adams had famously commanded, but throughout the rest of the calendar as well. In the last decade of the nineteenth century a new forum for international sport, and for the crafting of patriotism, debuted. In the modern Olympic Games France’s Baron Pierre de Coubertin created a powerful forum for the display of nations. Clothed in the rhetoric of international cosmopolitanism like the world’s fairs on which the Baron modelled much of the initial Olympic structure, the games, like world’s fairs, have historically provided opportunities for rabid displays of national chauvinism. The measurement of nations, as de Coubertin himself understood, resides at the centre of the Olympic movement, the same place it occupied in the world’s fair movement. [4] The United States was well-suited and well-situated to take advantage of the Olympian possibilities for the manufacture of patriotism. Beginning at the inaugural modern games at Athens in 1896, the United States launched a concerted effort to The International Journal of the History of Sport Vol. 25, No. 2, February 15th 2008, 135 – 141