Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an article about “The Olympics of 1904: Comedic, Disgraceful and ‘Best Forgotten’” [link probably for subscribers only]. The title hits the mark. The best that one can say about the third edition of the modern Games, held in St. Louis as an adjunct to the considerably more successful World’s Fair, is that “American athletes won 238 medals – 223 more than the second-place Germans”.
To pad the rather thin proceedings (only 12 countries sent athletes), the organizers came up with the idea of a separate competition for “uncivilized tribes”, dubbed “Anthropology Days”, featuring Amerindians and black Africans.
The final report on the World’s Fair expressed the organizers’ disappointment with the performances of the “savages.” Their running was “very poor,” javelin throwing was “another disappointment,” and the best attempt in the 16-pound shot-put contest “was so ridiculously poor that it astonished all who witnessed it.”
In short, the competitors, who had never been taught or trained in any of these events, “proved themselves inferior athletes, greatly overrated,” the report concluded.
Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron who resuscitated the Olympic Games in 1896, didn’t come to St. Louis. He was appalled when he heard about “Anthropology Days.” Such events, he said, “will, of course, lose their appeal when black men, red men and yellow men learn to run, jump and throw, and leave the white men behind them.”
Baron de Coubertin gets high marks for prescience, and the organizers’ report sounds silly to modern ears. I wonder, though, how the story’s next paragraph will resonate a century from now:
Indeed, in the regular games that year, George Poage, running for the Milwaukee Athletic Club, became the first African-American athlete to win a medal in the modern Olympics.
It would be hard to pack more politically correct absurdity into so short and innocuous a passage. Note, first, the use of “African-American” as an unnecessary euphemism for “black”; second, the covert assumption that a Negro living in Milwaukee in 1904 had much in common with “Pygmies, Sioux, Patagonians” and other tribesmen living on the margins of civilization; and, third, the implication that “African-Americans” might have won medals in the ancient Olympics.
Humorists will someday compile anthologies of material like this, and our descendants – black, white, brown, red, yellow, green or blue – will laugh uproariously at the racial prudery of this generation.
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