America's athletic missionaries: The Olympic Games and the creation of a national culture, 1896-1936.

During the late nineteenth century American reformers crafted a physical culture designed to help adjust their nation to the social changes fostered by industrialization, urbanization and immigration. The creators of modern sport considered athletics a "technology" for building a modern liberal civilization. Their "sporting republic" quickly gained a prominent place in American life. America's Athletic Missionaries examines the impact that United States participation in the Olympic Games, from 1896 to 1936, had on American culture. The idea of the sporting republic united politics and the strenuous life. In the Olympics Americans discovered a particularly rich environment for both athletic and political demonstrations. The architects of the sporting republic thought that sport could create livable urban environments, fight crime, promote democracy, Americanize the recently acquired empire, and assimilate immigrant populations. American Olympic teams earned the moniker of "America's athletic missionaries" for their performances at the first five Olympic Games. American Olympians enjoyed the active support of the political, business and academic elite. Lionized by the press and showered with public acclaim, the Olympians became symbols of the power of sport in channeling human energy in socially productive directions. During the 1920s the role of the sporting republic underwent a transformation. Sport, as had many other facets of Progressive reform, had been accepted as part of the orthodoxy of American values. But the political nature of sport changed. Abandoned by intellectuals who associated it with middle-class materialism, sport was increasingly cast as a form of escapism and disassociated from political action. The new version of sport became one of the totems of consumer culture. The press depicted the Olympic Games of the 1920s as sensational spectacles, without any significant political overtones. By the 1930s Americans had rediscovered the political uses of sport. Much of the world had come to view the Olympic Games as tests of national strength and many countries devoted great resources in the pursuit of athletic conquest. This study examines the relationship between political and physical culture, the uses of athletic ideology in the construction of American civilization, and the function of sport as a cultural tool