Theodore Roosevelt: Father of a Sporting Nation

Theodore Roosevelt was, in many ways, the father of a sporting nation. Roosevelt, more than any president before, and perhaps since, sought to bind the presidency to the ideas of masculinity and athleticism. Roosevelt felt that the nation needed to reflect these virtues if it were to succeed in rising further as a great power on the world stage. However, this chapter shows the other side of Roosevelt’s paternal role, by exploring his aims for his own children and their contemporaries. This chapter unpicks a largely ignored speech by Roosevelt at Harvard in order to unravel the wider significance of Roosevelt’s vision. He sought not only to prevent a generation of “mollycoddles” from losing their seemingly virile edge, but an entire nation. In this sense, colleges and the young people who attended them had to commit to embedding athleticism to stop some sort of gradual wasting setting in. Roosevelt did not want the rising U.S. empire to fall into decadence and decline like so many before it. In unpacking this multifaceted speech, this chapter brings fresh focus to Roosevelt’s faith in sporting prowess to help keep the nation’s edge as the challenges of the frontier faded into the distance.