Players in the US Soccer team, 1916 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Us vs. Them

Sports on the World Stage

01.26.18

This year’s Winter Olympics have already seen their share of drama — and political jockeying — and the games haven’t even begun. So, BackStory is digging into the history of the power of international sports. We’ll discuss how sports have been tangled up in what’s going on off the field, from Cold War politics to Americans’ sense of ourselves at home and abroad.

Olympic Games; competition; international relations; sports

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Segments

Do You Believe in Miracles

Historian Don Ableson tells Brian about The Miracle on Ice, an unlikely Olympic matchup between the USSR, then the strongest hockey team in the world, and a group of American college kids.

Music:

Fingernail Grit by Podington Bear

Logjam by Podington Bear

1980 Winter Olympics; Cold War; U.S.-Russia/Soviet Union relations; hockey; sports

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BRIAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Backstory.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week, we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Russian athletes have dominated the winter Olympiads. But this year, the evee-formidable Russian Olympic team banned from the 2018 winter games in South Korea because of prior systemic doping.

MALE SPEAKER: Today, the UN ambassador said it’s an open question whether the United States will participate in the Winter Olympics in South Korea. Is it an open question, is that now in doubt?

MALE SPEAKER: An Olympics first tonight for North and South Korea, they’ll play together. A United women’s hockey team.

ED: The 23rd Winter Olympics is about to open in Pyongyang, South Korea. And given the tensions in that peninsula, the event has something of a Cold War feel to it.

BRIAN: Our first story takes us back to 1980. It was tough times for the United States. The Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan and the United States was in the dying days of the Carter presidency.

But, the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid are about to serve up an unexpected sporting victory against the Soviets, which gives American morale a much-needed shot in the arm. No wonder it got called “The Miracle on Ice.”

DON ABELSON: The United States, in many respects at that time, felt paralyzed on the world stage.

BRIAN: This is Don Abelson, professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.

DON ABELSON: Jimmy Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1980, often talked about a crisis in confidence that Americans had lost faith in government, that they had lost faith in the ability of the United States to project power abroad.

BRIAN: Throughout the Cold War, sports had become a proxy for political antagonism between East and West. But the American ice hockey team at the Winter Olympics was an unlikely group of national heroes.

DON ABELSON: And this team of 20 college students came together under the leadership of the legendary college coach Herb Brooks from the University of Minnesota. And these were kids drawn mainly from Minnesota and throughout Massachusetts, primarily in the Boston area.

BRIAN: And these college students were facing the most fearsome ice hockey team in the world.

DON ABELSON: And the Soviet Union had won the Olympic gold medal in hockey in 1964, ’68, ’72, and ’76. Not surprisingly, were heavily favored to take the gold again in 1980.

BRIAN: Yeah, didn’t they have some awesome nickname like “The Big Red Machine” or something like that?

DON ABELSON: They were the Big Red Machine.

BRIAN: They were the Big Red Machine. Now, understand that the first game that the United States played which ended in a tie, the stadium was only half-full.

DON ABELSON: I don’t even think it was half-full.

BRIAN: Yet, when they faced off against the Soviet Union several games later–

[CHANTS OF ‘USA’]

it was packed to the gills and the fans were shouting “USA, USA” even before the game started.

DON ABELSON: Oh, people went crazy. So, you’re absolutely right, when the games began– you know, the first game that the US played in their pool was against Sweden. And it was very, very late in the third period that they were able to tie it up and it ended up being 2-2.

Then they went on and they played Czechoslovakia, which was really ranked second in the pool. They defeated the Czechs, 7-2– or 7-3. That was a fantastic team. And then they went on to beat the Romanians, the West Germans, and the Norwegians before getting to the Soviets.

So every time they were able to win a game, the media focus became more intense. Politicians began to focus more on what was happening in Lake Placid. So, not surprisingly, by the time they entered the first medal game– or the medal round against the Soviet Union– there was this frenzy around the American team. And, as Al Michaels of ABC News at the time– and he was one of the key broadcasters along with the legendary Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden said,

“you know most of the people in this arena– most of the people in this country– might not know the difference between a blue line and a clothesline, but they do understand the significance of this contest.” And he was right. It wasn’t about hockey, it was about what a potential victory represented.

BRIAN: But in a match that was increasingly cast as an episode in the Cold War, the American College students kept their cool on the ice.

DON ABELSON: For the players, it was about a hockey game. It was a sport they loved, it was something they felt passionate about. And, yes, they were going up against a team that had won four previous gold medals. And, yes, they thought, staring across the ice, that these were many of the players that they had admired for years.

But I think they were able to keep focused on what was important. And, although other people wanted to draw them into this Cold War arena, although they wanted them to take on a role that they were uncomfortable with, they were able to remain focused on the issue at hand, and that was to play a sport that they loved.

BRIAN: The American team had a strong leader in their inspirational coach Herb Brooks. Brooks had spent time in the USSR watching their game. And he understood just what it would take to win against the Soviets.

DON ABELSON: Certainly in the Olympics, when you’re playing against all of these European teams, particularly the Soviets, the emphasis had to be on skating, it had to be on speed, it had to be on passing. It really had to be executed with what he regarded as surgical precision, and get the players to think less about themselves individually and more as a team.

BRIAN: And, it worked.

DON ABELSON: It’s akin to a college football team beating the Green Bay Packers. That’s what they did.

BRIAN: Even the Soviet players were able to acknowledge that something quite incredible had happened.

DON ABELSON: The Soviets saw the Americans celebrating– and it’s that famous photo of sticks and gloves in the air and helmets coming off and players on the ice hugging each other and crying and looking up to the heavens just wondering how is it that this happened. Many of the Soviet players looked at the Americans and thought, we have lost that feeling. Look at how the Americans are celebrating, look at what this means to them, perhaps it didn’t mean as much to us.

BRIAN: Before long, Don Abelson says that the Miracle on Ice was being used by Americans who were desperate for a much-needed national victory.

DON ABELSON: The media certainly embraced it, policy-makers did. President Carter was among the first people to call Herb Brooks and the team to congratulate them. Later on, Ronald Reagan would tap into the victory as a way of promoting American values and our ideology and political system over that of the Soviets.

So it became far more than a hockey game in the ensuing years. But there’s no question that, even today, when people watch footage of that game and what it represented, it really sends a chill down their spine. It was a magical moment which helped not only bring hockey onto the radar in the United States, but I think played a very important role in boosting the spirits of a nation that was suffering terribly.

The Sporting Life

Historian Kenneth Cohen tells Ed about the emergence of a national sporting tradition in the mid-19th century United States and how Americans expressed sectional tensions through sports.

Music:

no fix by Ketsa

competition; international relations; popular culture; sports

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ED: For the rest of the hour today on Backstory, we’re going to be marking the upcoming Winter Olympics with a look back on the history of Americans competing on the world stage. And what those competitions have meant to the people back home.

BRIAN: We’ve got stories about the first American woman to throw the shotput on foreign shores. About the famous black power salute on the Olympic victory stand in 1968, and about the tectonic geopolitical shift that was triggered by a game of– yeah– ping-pong.

But first, we’re going to dial the clock back to the years before the American Revolution. As you can imagine, this was a time before American athletes competed as Americans. But sports were already an important feature of social life and the category of sports encompassed a surprisingly wide range of activity.

KENNETH COHEN: All sorts of competitions– in the colonial period, there’s a reference to sport being a question of whether a man can smoke 100 pipes in the course of a day. Which a man does in a Philadelphia tavern and then promptly dies before he can walk out.

ED: This is Kenneth Cohen, a historian of sports at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Ken told me that when it came to the things that we would more easily recognize as sports today, like horse racing or cockfighting, there were representative competitions going back as early as the 1720s when counties would go up against counties, or one colony would challenge the other.

And so I asked him if the revolution ushered in a new period when Americans competed in sports as Americans.

KENNETH COHEN: Well I don’t know that the revolution actually sparked national or international competition in some way, that’s still a long way off. But the revolution does impinge on sport. Because the Continental Congress and a number of state legislatures ban a wide range of the best known and most organized sporting activities in the period, claiming that these are a waste of resources, a waste of time, that they are an immoral distraction from the pure cause of liberty.

ED: So after the revolution, it kind of goes through the crucible of saying, hey, not now, we’re fighting a war, we’re creating a nation. But then the sports reassert themselves. What does that look like, Ken?

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, and so that is actually in many ways more discursive, or in the language than it is in the actual act of participating in sports. So even through the Revolutionary Period, you find newspaper articles that sort of reference British imperial politics as a horse race in which the factions that support America are presented as horses named Liberty or names that Americans would identify with.

And then there are the factions that oppose Americans which are presented with horses with horrible names like Changeling, you don’t know what they’re going to become and what they’re going to do to you. And the Americans really do use sport as a metaphor even though the actual activities are banned and, to some extent, become less frequent during the Revolutionary Period.

And this then carries through to the post-war period and really begins to flourish when America fights Britain again in the War of 1812. The best example of this is a great political cartoon that shows James Madison boxing George the Fourth. And George the Fourth is punched in the nose and he’s actually streaming blood out of his nose in the cartoon. And Madison is sort of saying “ha ha,” you’re overweight and out of shape and can’t handle this fight.

ED: I’m sure it doesn’t say, and I’m five foot three and weigh 105 pounds, right?

KENNETH COHEN: Right, and you’re in an entirely different weight class, so, it’s in all sorts of ways.

ED: Exactly, he was not the most pugilistic of our presidents I wouldn’t think. So you have all this kind of metaphorical use of sport. Does the reality of sport begin to catch up with us as the country regains its balance after the War of 1812?

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, so it takes a while. These bans get lifted as America is reaching or enjoying an economic boom that does allow wealthier Americans to begin to fund, and finance, and organize larger scale sporting events. And it’s– the moral critique against these activities certainly continues, but it gets less traction. People look around and say, well, we’re doing fine, we can afford to do these kinds of things now.

And so you really see a take off in these regional representative events, in terms of a series of North and South horse races starting in the 1820s, which get the most press and attract probably the largest crowds of any sporting events before the Civil War. These are presented as section and regional events.

ED: It seems like a kind of a dangerous way to array competition at a time when the real competition between slavery and free labor and the Republicans the Democrats, whatever, is brewing.

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, I think it could have been. But the way that sport is constructed by the folks who are funding these events really sort of bridges that gap and sport becomes a place where Americans can play out these tensions in a somewhat safer space, a safer way.

And so the northern elite and the southern elite are both using these events to sort of rally support behind them within their regions in a very subtle, very political way. Yet, it’s important to recognize– having said that there’s not a whole lot of differences between the way the Northerners and Southerners approach these kinds of sporting events and the way they organize them– there is a difference in the way they execute them. And so the races in particular reflect one of those primary differences, right which is the labor system.

Where Southerners primarily employ African-American slaves to ride their horses, and Northerners primarily, but not exclusively, employ, generally, Irishmen to ride their horses. Which, of course, really reflects that labor divide but does so in a way, again, that’s trying to rally the general population behind their leaders and representatives from their region.

ED: So, by the 1830s, ’40s, the United States has recovered its sporting mojo and sports are– especially horse racing– seem to be quite common. In other venues, the United States is eager to project itself onto the world stage. Does the same thing happen in sport?

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, I think all of this overall economic growth that we talked about in the first half of the 19th century has America feeling its oats, right. Whether you’re talking about theater and the search for a great American drama, or whether you’re talking about sporting events and trying to prove to the world that America is a mature and competitive country on the global scene, you do find a nationalism sort of sparking a greater conversation.

And so, by the time you get to the 1840s and 1850s, Americans are trying to stage and challenge, largely England, to a range of sporting competitions. The first notable one of these is the America’s Cup, the sailing competition that still exists today.

But shortly on the heels of that, you have a chess prodigy, Paul Morphy from New Orleans who goes over to England and basically beats all the individual national champions around Europe who are willing to face him. And so he comes back hailed as a world champion who’s placed America on the global sporting stage.

ED: Now I can’t help but notice as a historian of the Civil War that a lot of this really seems to be picking up in the 1850s. Is there anything to be made of the fact that United States is projecting itself as a unified nation abroad at the same time it’s kind of coming apart at the seams at home?

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, I mean for the same reason that we talk about so many of the regional and local events being staged in a way that tries to tie local populations to local leaders or regional populations to regional leaders, these representational sporting events– there’s always a certain element of promoting domestic unity in one’s own backyard as much as there is projecting some sort of identity or superiority against your opponent.

And so that’s certainly true in the 1850s and 1860s. There’s a great quote from a newspaper covering Paul Morphy’s chess tour. And when he comes back home, there’s this great celebration. The newspaper says– I’m gonna quote here– “they have come with fraternal impulses from the hills of New England, the rich regions of the middle states, the flowery prairies of the illimitable west. And from my own golden and sunny section where the blue waves of the Gulf of Mexico swell up a constant choral symphony with the music of our national union. They come together as strangers, but they have met as brothers and friends.”

And so all of these supporters of chess from all corners of the country come together to support Paul Morphy, our national champion, which sort of speaks to our roots as a unified country.

ED: That’s a great quote.

KENNETH COHEN: Yeah, and so you can really see this being spun in a way to try to represent the fact that sporting culture does bridge these sectional divides and it’s a way in which leaders in both regions try to hold the pieces together over the course of the long, sectional fission that ultimately results in the Civil War.

ED: Ken, thanks so much for explaining this complicated story to us.

KENNETH COHEN: Thanks for having me.

ED: Kenneth Cohen is a history professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He’s the author of They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic.

Walk This Way

Ed talks with author Matthew Algeo, about the most popular spectator sport of the 1870s – competitive pedestrianism – and the international walk-off that had Americans on the edge of their seats.

Music:

Mello D by Podington Bear

competition; fandom; international relations; popular culture; sports

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Our next story has to do with a sport that I recently learned was America’s most popular spectator sport of the 1870s and 1880s. Brian, any guesses to what that sport might be?

BRIAN: Oh come on, Ed, this is, first of all, out of my century. I’m going with horse racing.

ED: OK, and what’s your logic on that?

BRIAN: There were a lot of horses back then, we hadn’t invented the car, I don’t know.

ED: OK, that’s a very presentistic perspective. So let me give you some hints. This is a sport that involves competitions lasting several days on end. It was so taxing, in fact, that many of the athletes who participated in it died young.

BRIAN: Wow, would you like to refine your answer? So taxing, well that rules out golf. You know I’m going to forget curling, too. You better tell me what it is.

ED: Competitive walking. You laugh. No, and it was– perhaps you would laugh less if you knew it was called Pedestrianism. In the most popular version of the sport, competitors would walk on an indoor track for six days straight.

BRIAN: Oh my god. Historian Matthew Algeo told me about the huge numbers of people packing into arenas to watch the walking matches.

MATTHEW ALGEO: Most of the big races took place at Madison Square Garden, the first Madison Square Garden, in New York. And because the race was continuous, people were coming and going all day, day and night. And so total attendance for the week might be 100,000 or more.

ED: These races were so popular that kids would imitate the walks of their favorite pedestrians. One of the most famous walkers was Edward Payson Weston. He was known for walking with exaggerated swinging hips, wearing flashy outfits, and carrying a gold-tipped cane.

Now, he made a name for himself by walking up and down and around the east coast. But in 1875, he lost a big race out in Chicago, and that’s when Weston decided to take his act overseas. He sailed to London to challenge William Perkins, the champion Pedestrian of Britain, to a 24-hour race.

MATTHEW ALGEO: Now the British really considered themselves the originators of the sport of Pedestrianism. There’d been a Scottish guy named Captain Barclay who famously walked 1,000 miles– one mile every hour for 1,000 consecutive hours– something like 41 days.

ED: Wow.

MATTHEW ALGEO: This was in 1809. It’s many years later, but the Brits still considered themselves the inventors of the game, so to speak. And they were very suspicious of Weston. For one thing, they didn’t believe some of the records that he had claimed to set, walking 100 miles in 24 hours, for instance.

They just thought maybe these were outright fabrications or there could be a problem measuring distance or time, that sort of thing. And also, Weston got on their nerves because he embodied everything that the Brits hated about Americans. He was flashy, he was cocky, he would play the coronet while he walked. And he was kind of like the Muhammad Ali of his era– very divisive figure. And would really play it up to the crowd, ham it up. Again, this was really not considered sportsmanlike by the Brits, and so it further added fuel to the fire of anti-Weston sentiment.

ED: And the British were also suspicious of American stamina and athleticism in general, right?

MATTHEW ALGEO: Yeah there was an article in The Lancet, which is a medical journal, scientific journal– still published today– just before the first Western race in London. And I’m just going to read here, the Journal said, American athletes were “far beyond other nations in their hygienic unwholesomeness, living habitually in their close, stove-heated rooms, bolting their food at railway speed. Year by year, Americans growth thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived.

ED: Wow.

MATTHEW ALGEO: So, I don’t think the thinner part really applies anymore today. But we do probably still eat too quickly. But definitely– The Lancet, I mean that’s a fairly respected medical journal, even in 1876. And they were pretty unequivocal that Americans were inferior in many ways, especially at athletics.

ED: So Weston’s bringing quite a heavy burden, not only of his fancy clothing and gold-tipped cane, but also of suspicion that the United States never really would produce great athletes. So he shows up there, 1876, challenges the English champion pedestrian, and then what happens?

MATTHEW ALGEO: Well, this is a match– it was a 24-hour race. And the long and the short of it is, Weston won. He defeated Perkins. Perkins quit after just 65 miles. Weston went on to walk 109 miles. It was said Perkins’ feet were so blistered and he was so footsore that it was literally impossible for him to keep walking.

And so this really stunned the British. They were flabbergasted, really, not only that Weston had won but that he had won so decisively.

ED: And did this change their mind? After this, did they kind of slap the side of their heads and say, oh, we were mistaken, Americans, in fact, are wonderful natural athletes. Which I think Americans today would believe. That there’s something about our landscape, the vast open spaces, the the shoulder room, that would actually make us more athletic. Was Pedestrianism a turning point in that, do you think?

MATTHEW ALGEO: It was a little bit, actually. Because after Weston had his very successful series of exhibitions in London, one of the newspapers came out and basically apologized and said it’s true that Mr. Weston is no chicken. And it was interesting to see this gradual changing of attitudes. I think Weston had a lot to do with that. He proved Americans could compete on the international stage.

ED: Did people in the states show as much interest in the Weston-Perkins race as the Brits did?

MATTHEW ALGEO: Yes, they did. The first transatlantic cable had been laid– I think it was about 10 years before. And newspapers would print extra editions or have big chalkboards out front that they would do lap-by-lap updates of where the competitors stood in international athletic contests that you could follow in real time on both sides of the Atlantic.

ED: Well, you know, I supposedly am a historian of 19th century America and I must admit, Matthew, this is the first that I’ve ever heard of this. Why is that– how has this fallen out of our consciousness if it was so popular?

MATTHEW ALGEO: A couple of things. One, it was hurt by gambling scandals. There was also a doping scandal. Weston, when he was in London, he was found to be chewing coca leaves during a race. And he just insisted this was on doctor’s orders, it was not meant to give him any advantage, of course.

But there were reports of other racers were using strychnine to stay awake. So it became almost a public health issue. There was a backlash. Ministers began sermonizing against Pedestrianism. They thought it was excessive and abusive to the competitors.

But the real answer to your question is that in the mid 1880s, around 1885, a British guy– John Starley was his name– he invented the first safety bicycle, the bicycle we still use today. And these were fun to race for six days. And almost overnight, six-day bicycle racing replaced Pedestrianism as the most popular endurance sport.

You know, I say Pedestrianism was NASCAR at four miles an hour. Well, with the six-day bicycle race was NASCAR, now it was up to 15, 20 miles an hour, and you could have crashes. It was much more fun to watch, especially the fifth or sixth day when everybody was so out of their mind with sleep deprivation.

ED: Matthew Algeo is the author of Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport. Matthew spoke to us from his home in Mongolia.

A Hop, Skip, and a Jump

Producer Kelly Jones and archivist Jane Tuttle bring us the story of trailblazer Lucile Godbold’s participation in international athletics in the 1920s, which brought pressure to reform women’s sports back in the US.

Music:

Pigalle by Jahzzar

Bliss by Podington Bear

So It Goes by Podington Bear

competition; gender norms; sports

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: In the early 1920s, American women were coming into their own. They won their long battle for the right to vote, and more women were going to college. A booming economy meant new employment opportunities.

Flappers were pushing the boundaries of female sexuality. American women were making great strides, but not in sports.

ED: In 1922, a small group of female track and field athletes set out to change that. Despite inadequate training and a lack of national support, a team of 15 women sailed to France to participate in the first international track meet for women. Former Backstory producer Kelly Jones has the story.

KELLY JONES: At 21, Lucille Godbold stood just over six feet tall.

JANE TUTTLE: I think she probably looked more like her father than she looked like her mother.

KELLY JONES: This is Jane Tuttle, a librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina. Lucille Godbold wasn’t especially beautiful by 1920s standards, but that didn’t matter. She had a wicked arm.

JANE TUTTLE: At a track meet in her senior year, she broke the American record for the shotput. And so she was invited in May to take part in the tryouts for the first international track meet for women that was going to Paris in August.

KELLY JONES: That track meet was a scheme designed by the French to establish women’s track and field as an official Olympic event. In the early ’20s there were no standard Olympic sports for women. Some years, there would be golf or tennis, others there might be swimming or archery. There weren’t any track and field events.

At home the American Physical Education Association, the APEA, discouraged women from track and field because they believed that lots of running and jumping could knock women’s reproductive systems out of whack making them unable to fulfill their primary social role as mothers.

Competitive sports were thought to be too intense for educated ladies.

JANE TUTTLE: They felt emotionally it was very tough on women to lose. And if you were in the elite of society who were actually going to college, track and field it was not something that you needed to get involved in.

KELLY JONES: But Dr. Harry Eaton Stewart, an American physiotherapist, didn’t buy those claims. He wanted to prove the APEA wrong. He asked for help from a group called the Amateur Athletic Union who governed sports outside of schools. But they refused him.

So he held his own tryouts and his athletes organized bake sales to fund the trip. On August 1, 1922, Lucille Godbold and 14 other women set sail for Paris.

JANE TUTTLE: This is Lucille talking about the meet. “Just before it began, each team marched around the field with one member carrying her nation’s flag. I was chosen to carry Old Glory and believe me, I was proud to lead that American team around the track.”

KELLY JONES: Five teams competed that day. Great Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and the American underdogs. Though the other teams had all competed internationally before, the women on the US team had hardly any practice competing at home. In front of a crowd of 20,000 people, Lucille Godbold earned six medals in seven events, and set a new world record in shotput, unseating the French champion.

JANE TUTTLE: She says, “the announcer took me around and introduced me to all those thousands of people in French. He might’ve been cussing me out, for all I know. But as everybody clapped, I reckon it was all OK. I can see those Americans yelling now. They open their mouths so wide I was scared to death for fear the sun would warp their ribs or blister their tonsils.”

KELLY JONES: The US team came in second overall, losing only to Great Britain. The team’s successes should have convinced the APEA that women could achieve more than society had planned for them and that women could handle competition.

JANE TUTTLE: But actually, it went in the opposite direction. The physical education directors dug in their heels even more. A lot of high schools and colleges suspended their track and field programs. And they set out to put an end to track and field.

KELLY JONES: The team’s successes in Paris did prove their point to the AAU, the group that governs sports outside of schools, who began to fund women’s track and field teams the very next year. That paved the way for athletic superstars like Babe Didrikson and Stella Walsh in the ’30s and ’40s to rise to fame without the help of college programs.

And the French scheme eventually worked. Six years after the meet in Paris, five track and field events for women were included in the Olympics in Amsterdam.

But what should have been a no-brainer was a struggle. Instead of catapulting American women into the international sports arena, participating in the first international track meet for women was a small hop, step, and jump on the road to equal play.

BRIAN: That’s former Backstory producer Kelly Jones. We also heard from Jane Tuttle, a librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina

Black Power Salute

Brian talks with sociologist Harry Edwards, founder of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, about the iconic moment at the 1968 Olympic Games: when African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in silent protest on the winners’ podium.

Music:
Wild Ones by Jahzzar

1968 Summer Olympics; African American athletes; activist athletes; protest; sports

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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We’re going to turn now to one of the most iconic images from American sports history. It’s from the summer Olympics of 1968 held in Mexico City. American runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos had just won the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter race.

ED: As they stood on the victory stand and received their medals, they bowed their heads and each held one of their fists, sheathed in a black glove, up to the sky in what would, at the time, have been recognized as the symbol for black power. It was a moment of silent, but powerful, protest.

BRIAN: The symbolism didn’t stop there. Smith and Carlos came to the victory stand shoeless to represent the poverty afflicting black people in America. Smith wore a black scarf to represent black pride and Carlos unzipped his tracksuit, revealing a necklace of beads that memorialized victims of lynching. And both men, as well as the white medalist from Australia, wore buttons for an organization called the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

ED: The organization had formed the previous Fall, and they had originally favored an Olympic boycott by athletes. Their demands were that South Africa and Rhodesia would be uninvited from the games, that the heavyweight title that had been stripped from Muhammad Ali for refusing military service, be restored. That the longtime president of the International Olympic Committee step down, and that more African-Americans be hired as assistant coaches.

BRIAN: Harry Edwards had been a scholarship athlete with Tommie Smith at San Jose State. He returned there to teach in 1968, and he spearheaded the Olympic Project for Human Rights. I sat down with Edwards in 2014 and asked him about Smith and Carlos’ famous act of protest on the victory stand.

HARRY EDWARDS: Well the immediate result was tremendous booing, catcalls– there were a lot of United States citizens at the games in Mexico City, an easily accessible Olympic Games. And they took tremendous exception at the gesture by Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

They were banned from the Olympic Village and then shipped out of Mexico a day and a half later by the United States Olympic Committee. Once they got here, the death threats and so forth began to roll in. I mean, it is very, very difficult to understand the kind of courage that it took for these two men to do what they did.

And there was even some confusion in the African-American community about the appropriateness and so forth of what they did. Many African-Americans assumed that sport was this citadel of interracial harmony and brotherhood. And so when Smith and Carlos began to demonstrate and to protest, not just what was going on in society but in sport itself, many black Americans did not understand.

Of course, over the years, as more and more discussion and so forth came on about how black athletes were often used and exploited to project and present one image while black people in this country were living another type of experience, more and more black people came to understand that not only was the gesture that Smith and Carlos did from the Olympic podium appropriate, it was absolutely necessary.

BRIAN: I’m curious to know whether what Smith and Carlos did in ’68 differed in any way from what other athletes had done before them.

HARRY EDWARDS: I think we have to understand that every generation of athletes protests within the context of their circumstances. At the turn of the 20th century, African-American athletes receive virtually no coverage, much less adulation and applause for their athletic prowess in this country.

They were in a constant struggle for legitimacy. And so it was the international arena that this legitimacy typically was demonstrated, and that was a profound form of protest. Whether it was Jesse Owens winning four gold medals in the ’36 Olympics, Joe Lewis winning the heavyweight championship, and the immediate post-World War II era, the struggle was for access. Fighting for desegregation, becoming involved in a struggle for access.

And, of course, you saw Jackie Robinson at the Brooklyn Dodgers being, really, the face of that struggle for access. By the 1960s, the struggle was for dignity, and respect, and equity of outcomes beyond the sports arena.

So every generation’s struggle is different and it’s within the context of the circumstances that they are confronted with.

BRIAN: You know, there are prominent athletes today who say we shouldn’t be mixing sports and political protests and we definitely shouldn’t be mixing them in huge venues like the World Cup or the Olympics. In light of your own history, what would you say to those people?

HARRY EDWARDS: We thought the Olympics were a– not just an appropriate, but a preferable form. Because it is the second-most political forum outside of the United Nations itself in the international arena. Also, the Olympics had long been political. Not just going back to the Nazi Olympics of 1936, but going back to the racial Olympics in St. Louis in 1904 when there was an effort to demonstrate white superiority over the non-white peoples of the world by literally cataloging, scientifically, the outcomes of races and so forth involving whites who competed against non-white people. So the games have long been political.

George Foreman, who was the heavyweight boxing champion of the 1968 Olympics, walked around the ring waving an American flag, which was a totally political gesture. No one in the United States Olympic Committee, or in the International Olympic movement accused him of engaging in politics when it was crystal clear that that gesture was in response to Smith and Carlos.

BRIAN: So celebratory politics is just fine, it’s only the oppositional politics that draws the kind of attention and criticism that Smith and Carlos did.

JANE TUTTLE: Absolutely. I mean this notion that somebody told me, well Dr. Edwards, I understand what you are trying to do. But we shouldn’t expose our dirty laundry to the world. Well, every time someone was lynched, it was on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. When Dr. King was shot, it was on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. That was airing our dirty laundry.

And we weren’t protesting America. We were protesting racism and discrimination in America and demonstrating that we have the freedom and the right to protest our right, which is what America was supposed to be about. They should have been proud to have that on the front pages of newspapers around the world as opposed to the deaths of three civil rights workers trying to register black people to vote in Mississippi. Or the pictures of a church that had been bombed where four little black girls were killed while they were praying.

They should have been proud to have Smith and Carlos on the front pages instead of that. That was the airing of our dirty laundry as a nation and as a society.

BRIAN: Harry Edwards is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley. He’s a consultant for the San Francisco 49ers, and he’s written numerous books about African-American athletes, including The Revolt of the Black Athlete

Ping-Pong Diplomacy

Producer Bruce Wallace explains how ping-pong helped to thaw U.S.- China relations during the 1970s, while remaining a potent field for propaganda and espionage – with help from Nicholas Griffin, author of Ping-Pong Diplomacy, and Judy Bochenski – a former player on the U.S. team.
Music:
Kingbeat 9 by Podington Bear
Waxing waning by Ketsa
The Dirty by Podington Bear
Little Dipper by Podington Bear

China; Nixon adminstration; U.S.-China relations; diplomacy; international relations; sports

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ED: We’re talking about the history of American athletics on the world stage, and we’re going to turn now to another unexpected moment from that history. Teams from around the world had gathered in Nagoya. Japan for the 1971 World Table Tennis Finals. Table tennis, or ping-pong often evokes thoughts of basement rec rooms for Americans. But the sport was a big deal in Japan and China.

Nevertheless, these championships were an unlikely setting for a major diplomatic breakthrough between two of the Cold War’s biggest enemies. As Bruce Wallace reports, however, that’s exactly what happened.

BRUCE WALLACE: If you’ve heard anything about the events in April of 1971 that became known as Ping-pong Diplomacy, you’ve probably heard about this. Matches were winding down for the day, and a US player stumbled onto the Chinese team’s bus thinking it was going back to his hotel. There were a few tense moments and then the American strikes up a conversation.

His Chinese counterpart, the country’s best player, hands him a gift, a silkscreen with an image of the Kuang Shan Mountains.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: It’s this wonderful moment where these two athletes, one from communist China, and an American hippie from California, had this accidental meeting in the back of a bus, create this friendship, but that’s just not the true version of the story.

BRUCE WALLACE: This is Nicholas Griffin, author of a book called Ping-Pong Diplomacy.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: For the Chinese, this was a really methodical approach. The only person who didn’t know what was going on was Glenn Cowan, the American hippie.

BRUCE WALLACE: Beijing had stage-managed the event. Mao had been building China’s ping-pong team into a powerhouse. It became the vanguard of his soft power approach to improving the country’s image abroad.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: This was a very deliberate policy through the 1960s. So they would send the team out to countries they were interested in establishing foreign relations with, even before they had foreign relations. You could call them sporting ambassadors.

BRUCE WALLACE: On the surface, relations between China and the US in 1971 were as bad as they’d ever been since Mao came to power in 1949. But Nixon and Mao had both secretly started seeing the other as a way out.

China with a US ally could cool down a growing Soviet threat and China might give the US leverage in their stalled peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Of course, neither side could officially acknowledge this unless Mao and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai reasoned. They could first manufacture a very public, very friendly, and very benign exchange between the two countries, which brings us back to the bus in Japan.

Glenn Cowan and his Chinese counterpart stepped down from it and are surrounded by a scrum of journalists. One asked Cowan if his team would be interested in visiting China. The long hair says sure, and two days later, they were headed to Beijing for some friendly matches.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: The Americans had no idea what was about to happen to them. One day, they’re in America, then there in Japan for a few days for the tournament. And 48 hours later, they’re the first American delegation to enter communist China. I mean these guys know nothing about China, and there’s no reason they should.

FEMALE SPEAKER: We flew to Hong Kong, we took the train to the border, and we walked across the border before we got on another train.

BRUCE WALLACE: Judy [? Bohinski ?] was, at 15, the youngest of the US players.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Walking across the border was like being in a movie. There was this really dramatic, patriotic music playing. And it just looked different and everything smelled different. And it was just like something that I’d never seen before.

BRUCE WALLACE: The arena in Beijing was packed for their exhibition games with the Chinese. But the crowd was different than the ones [? Bohinski ?] was used to in the US.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Here, it’s just people are very individual. They scream, they yell, they clap at all different times. In China, at that time in 1971, It seemed like everything was in unison. Everybody clapped at the same time or stopped at the same time.

BRUCE WALLACE: [? Bohinski ?] won three of her four matches and says it was totally obvious that her opponent was letting her win. The team was also whisked around the country– walking on the Great Wall and petting water Buffalo at a commune. [? Bohinski ?] says everywhere she went, she saw pictures of Mao and signs with different political slogans.

FEMALE SPEAKER: There were some that were in English. And I remember one well, because I have a picture of myself standing in front of the sign. And it said, “People of the world, unite and defeat the US aggressors and all their running dogs.”

And when we asked, why did you have the sign, and they would say, oh, well, they make a distinction between our government and our people.

BRUCE WALLACE: What [? Bohinski ?] and her teammates didn’t see as they toured the country was how this trip was playing back home.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: The coverage it gets is extraordinary. On the first day that the American team is in China, there’s not one, two, three, four, there five articles in The New York Times and none of them are in the sports section. They’re carried on the front pages of every newspaper in the world. So the American team are catapulted to fame, but they’re the only ones who don’t know what’s happening. Because, of course, they can’t read any of this press because they’re in Communist China.

FEMALE SPEAKER: As soon as we left China, we went out the same way we came in. We took a train to the border, walked across the border, got onto another train. And on this train, it was jam-packed full of reporters. And every square inch of that train was full. And we were getting elbows in the face and cameras just right up in our face.

BRUCE WALLACE: And this global press attention is exactly what Mao and Nixon needed.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: The wonderful thing about this and why it worked so incredibly well is that it seemed utterly benign to Western press. I mean, it was ping-pong, how preposterous. But what it does, is it changes the way Americans think about the Chinese rapidly.

BRUCE WALLACE: News of happy American kids hanging out with their Chinese counterparts had been beamed around the world. A photo of Judy [? Bohinski ?] and Zhou Enlai shaking hands had been on the cover of newspapers everywhere. Maybe the Chinese weren’t so scary after all.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: So what it does, is it creates this enormous amount of maneuvering room for the politicians to carry out their desires. Because, ultimately, Mao and Nixon had been thinking along very similar lines for just over a year until that point. What it needed was a catalyst, and ping-pong was that catalyst.

BRUCE WALLACE: Three months later, Henry Kissinger flies to China for a secret meeting with Zhou Enlai. In early 1972, Nixon makes his trip to China, all because they decided to give ping-pong a chance.

BRIAN: That piece was reported by contributor Bruce Wallace. We also heard from US ping-pong player Judy [? Bohinski ?] and from writer Nicholas Griffin. He’s the author of Ping-Pong Diplomacy: the Secret History behind the Game that Changed the World.

End Riff

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ED: You know, Brian, it’s certainly the case we’re used to the arts playing a diplomatic role. And we’re even used to the exchange of athletic teams of different levels helping knit countries together. But I can’t really think of another instance in which a sport has played such a central diplomatic role as ping-pong diplomacy did. Why do you think that this was the singular example of sport being used to really do the heavy lifting of international diplomacy?

BRIAN: Ed, I think that there are two reasons here. One is that the gap between the United States and the People’s Republic of China politically simply seemed insurmountable. The Soviet Union, as you know, was our bitter enemy throughout the Cold War. But, for the most part, we talked to the Soviet Union. We even negotiated settlements with them from time to time.

We simply had no relationship with the People’s Republic of China. There was nothing there. There was nothing to work with there. The second reason, I think, has to do with how little knowledge each society had about the other society. So something that’s associated with regular people being at home in America suburban life like ping-pong was very effective for getting the people on each side of this great divide interested in each other, curious about each other.

And, of course, because each side knew nothing about each other, there was a great curiosity on both sides.

ED: You know, that’s interesting, Brian, because it’s certainly the case that the Americans and the Chinese not only did not know each other, what they did know about each other really led them to profoundly distrust each other. And sports are important, but sports are only a vehicle for other kinds of power.

BRIAN: Well, that’s right, Ed, but I also think we have this very strong belief that we can separate the two. You know, it’s so common to hear, oh, we shouldn’t pollute sports with politics. We’ve got to keep politics out of sports. Well, as it turns out, Ed, it’s hard to escape the long reach of politics. It pretty much penetrates most of what we do.

ED: And it’s pretty hard to escape the long reach of sports, too, so it’s not surprising that they get entangled.

BRIAN: I wouldn’t argue about that, Ed.

That’s going to do it for today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about American history. You’ll find us at Backstoryradio.org or send an email to Backstory@virginia.edu.

We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at Backstory radio. And if you like the show, feel free to review it in Apple Podcasts. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

ED: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, Emily [? Charnock, ?] Bruce Wallace, and Nina Earnest. Our staff includes David Stenhouse, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez.

Additional help came from Sam [? Olmschneider, ?] [? Angelie ?] [? Bishosh, ?] Sequoia [? Carillo, ?] Emma Gregg, Courtney [? Spahnya ?] and [? Erin ?] [? Thielly. ?] Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburg.

Other music in this episode came from [? Ketsa, ?] Paddington Bear, and [? Jazar. ?] Jamal Millner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher. And a special welcome to story stories new senior producer, David Stenhouse.

BRIAN: Backstory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. We’re a proud member of the panoply Podcast Network. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

JOANNE: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.