The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism

by Susan Brownell (Editor)

One of the more problematic sport spectacles in American history took place at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, which included the third modern Olympic Games. Associated with the Games was a curious event known as Anthropology Days organized by William J. McGee and James Sullivan, at that time the leading figures in American anthropology and sports, respectively. McGee recruited Natives who were participating in the fair’s ethnic displays to compete in sports events, with the “scientific” goal of measuring the physical prowess of “savages” as compared with “civilized men.” This interdisciplinary collection of essays assesses the ideas about race, imperialism, and Western civilization manifested in the 1904 World’s Fair and Olympic Games and shows how they are still relevant.


A turning point in both the history of the Olympics and the development of modern anthropology, these games expressed the conflict between the Old World emphasis on culture and New World emphasis on utilitarianism. Marked by Franz Boas’s paper at the Scientific Congress, the events in St. Louis witnessed the beginning of the shift in anthropological research from nineteenth-century evolutionary racial models to the cultural relativist paradigm that is now a cornerstone of modern American anthropology. Racist pseudoscience nonetheless reappears to this day in the realm of sports.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race

490 pages, Hardcover

First published November 24, 2007

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

There have been some pretty despicable things happen as part of the Olympics – live pigeon shooting in Paris 1900 for instance, or the wholesale destruction of large parts of cities to build white elephant stadia. There is little, however, that scores higher on the offensive scale than the ‘Anthropology Days’ at the 1904 games in St Louis. During these events, indigenous and native peoples ‘in town’ for display at the 1904 World’s Fair were pitted against Olympic athletes in what held to be a scientific ‘testing’ of their sporting and physical abilities. Not surprisingly, the well-trained élite athletes dominated (except, notably, in the women’s basketball!).

What is even more surprising is how little attention this affront to scholarship and to the participants has received in the scholarly literature. For the most part, sports historians have passed it by (as we have the 1904 Olympics), and I’ve not seen much evidence of it being picked up in other literatures either. This means that this very good collection of papers by key scholars in field fills a major gap and raises powerful questions about history, anthropology and the place in sport in colonial and imperial relations and ideologies.

To their credit, all the papers contextualise the Anthropology Days well, exploring not only the sport events themselves but also Olympic ideology of the time as seen in de Coubertin’s outlooks, the quantifying tendency in ‘racial science’ at the time as well as wider questions in (North) American imperialism. There are also papers then locate the Anthropology Days in longer term views and understandings of ‘race’, difference, inclusion and the (ab)uses of science in those settings. This breadth is one of the real strengths of this collection, reminding us also that the US empire had a long reach (Gerry Gems' paper on the construction of whiteness in US imperialism in the Philippines around this time is particularly welcome in this regard). Others make clear that indigenous peoples were not passive victims in all of this: Christine O’Bonsawin explores the nonparticipation by Canadian First Nations while Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith draw on some of the work in their fabulous Full Court Quest to discuss the Montana-based Fort Shaw Native School basketball team that dominated the women’s competition. The essays are not limited a North American focus; there are useful discussions of nations and national representation in respect of both German and Greek involvement with these games.

This is a academic collection of papers, emerging mainly from a conference on the topic, and although it seems to focus on a very narrow topic – two days at the 1904 Olympics which ran over several months alongside the World’s Fair – the book is extremely effective in its presentation that allows us to draw much wider conclusions. Part of that is down to the range of backgrounds of the authors – historians, sociologists, cultural and physical anthropologists – giving us a range of disciplines in dialogue in an open manner drawing on each other’s work an applying it through their own disciplinary lenses. As a result, the collection is as much about the history of anthropology and of science as it is about sport and the Olympics. The key thing all authors share is a diversely critical assessment of US imperial and colonial ideologies, and an ability to write in a clearly accessible manner making this also useful to non-specialists in and beyond academia.

Would that we had more of this kind of socially engaged, ecumenical critical scholarship. It is highly recommended.

[Clay Daneker · Rating 4 out of 5]

How could I pass on the opportunity to write this books second good reads review?

In just a few words: the 1904 combo World Fair and Olympics was an absolute fucking shit show