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Tyler Rode
Marc Horger
KNSISM 2210
1 December 2016
Influential Figures of Late-19th Century America Display Purpose through Sport
Sport is applied by people across the globe to fulfill a multitude of purposes which vary
widely from one person to the next, purposes largely determined by each individual which stem
from factors including the person’s background, perspective of the world, and the role that they
play in it. Sport is one cultural phenomenon which people use to express their very identity,
including their deepest philosophic views about life, as is also evident in music, visual art, and
poetry. Just as people today use sport to fulfill a wide variety of individual purposes, several
influential figures of late-nineteenth century American society including Theodore Roosevelt,
John L. Sullivan, and Walter Camp projected their views about the world as being centered
around survival of the fittest, self-branding, and influencing the culture all around oneself,
respectively, through the field of sport. Developing world circumstances in the nineteenth
century are a likely source of some views regarding this gigantic revolving sphere and people’s
place in it deviating from the norm of today’s passing bystander, and others fitting the currently-
perceived mold very well.
During the late-nineteenth century, a generation of well-off people stemming from the
economic boom of the Industrial Revolution began to worry about the state of their physical
fitness, as the jobs which they had now obtained no longer required strenuous, physically-
intensive tasks like laying down thousands of mile of railroads. Machine manufacturing greatly
reduced the work load of those who reaped the rewards of a nationalizing economy, leaving them
largely confined to desk jobs, which deprived these upper-class American males of the vigor

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which they had so laboriously used to display their masculinity and prowess throughout their
lineages of ancestors before them. As Elliot Gorn sums it up in his book, The Manly Art: Bare-
Knuckle Prize Fighting in America, “Countless men of means sought rugged action to
compensate for their safe and overstuffed lives,” and “sports were particularly well-suited to the
task” (188). This culture of robust and compensatory physicality likely stemmed from the
American male’s fascination with prowess and constant longing for ultimate superiority which
many historians believe to be innate to human nature. Fear of being surpassed by one’s fellow
male in the arena of physicality was intensified by the findings of Charles Darwin, whose
publishing On the Origin of Species established a survival of the fittest, dog-eat-dog mentality
among the American culture. This evolutionary concept spread throughout all aspects of life, and
leaked into sport rapidly, with its existence as a highly-monetized, mass-appealing business with
a culture of identity projection becoming Social Darwinism’s ultimate platform (Gorn 189). As
collegiate athletics began to take off, historic universities such as Harvard and Yale constantly
strived to field the highest-caliber teams which would display their prominence over the rest of
the nation in sports including rowing, baseball, soccer, and football throughout the course of the
mid-to-late nineteenth century (Rader 85-89). The entire country began to obsess over projecting
itself as superior- from its influential figures in politics to its star athletes to the colleges and
universities which they represented.
There was no better man alive in the late-nineteenth century to exemplify the extension of
Social Darwinism into all facets of life than Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt dedicated his entire
life to portraying himself as the most physically fit, rugged American ideal of a man, capable of
surviving in any wilderness, unafraid of fighting any man, and capable of winning any
intellectual bout. Roosevelt boxed at Harvard College in his youth, becoming a posterchild of
compensatory physicality (Gorn 195). Roosevelt put his high intellect and cultural prowess on

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display by attending a constantly multi-faceted educational, athletic, and social prestige-centric
college in Harvard. As if that were not enough to demonstrate his ‘high evolutionary status’ and
capability to survive and thrive in the real world, Roosevelt decided to participate in boxing
while there, quite possibly the single most survivalist mentality-based sport available, with the
man-on-man combat and outlasting of the opponent mentality central ideals to the sport. Even
after his competitive boxing days came to an end, Roosevelt still managed to use the sport to
demonstrate his perception of unmatched level of human evolution through his befriending of
boxing champions like John L. Sullivan and sparring matches with middleweight champion
Mike Donovan during his presidency. These connections gave him an incomparable level of
social equity, further racking up points on his imaginary scale of human evolution and
superiority (Gorn 203). Roosevelt devoted his entire livelihood to putting himself on display as
more fit for survival than the next man, a concept which he believed could be put on full display
through his activity in the sporting world.
Similarly demonstrating a physical prowess and masculinity showcase-based lifestyle,
but to a lesser extreme than his presidential counterpart, was a man by the name of John L.
Sullivan. Sullivan was a trailblazing figure in the world of boxing, as he literally ‘changed the
game’ when it came to the rules and monetization of the sport. After becoming the last man to
win and defend a boxing championship under the London Rules following his victory over
Joseph Killion (who took the ring name Jake Kilrain) in 1889, Sullivan went on a tour of North
America and Australia to celebrate his victory, as he had just earned twenty thousand dollars and
could afford the time to travel. When he returned from his tour, Sullivan made a revolutionary
move when he decided to challenge any opponent who believed they could defeat him to a title-
defending fight under the Queensbury Rules, a new set of rules which would allow him to fight
publically and endorse his fight, which meant more outside betting and thus opening up funding

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for the purse of each fight to more businesses who would no longer need to fear public backing
of illegal activities (Gorn 232-238). This move by Sullivan not only further circulated his name
in the news and among households, it also made it possible for boxers like Sullivan all over the
world to begin making a career out of boxing as a steady flow of revenue, with boxers no longer
having to worry about holding fights in discrete locations to avoid having their incomes shut
down and being arrested by law enforcement officials. Sullivan’s self-promotion started prior to
his Queensbury-only fighting days, when he traveled the globe on barnstorming tours and
participated in fights in between them. Sullivan stayed in the headlines just enough with his acute
alcoholism and the right amount of trash talk to make himself fun for journalists to write about,
further monetizing his brand as the heavyweight champ of the world (Gorn 227-230). As Elliot
Gorn states in his book, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America, “[N]ext to
fighting itself[,] John L.’s greatest talents lay in the show-business arts of self-advertisement and
self-promotion” (207). In fact, Sullivan was so good at self-promotion that “[b]y the end of the
nineteenth century he was certainly America’s best-known sports celebrity, and perhaps the
nation’s most famous citizen” (Gorn 237-238). Sullivan committed his entire career to ultimate
self-promotion, an approach to life in which sport was but one avenue with which he could
achieve just that.
Speaking of trailblazing men in sport of late-nineteenth century America, Walter Camp
was a pivotal figure in the development and spread of college football throughout this great
nation over the duration of the 1880s and 1890s. Camp, a football player at Yale through his
years as a student, helped to develop intercollegiate competition with a variety of rule changes
from the game of rugby throughout the 1880s including the introduction of a line of scrimmage
to separate the offense and defense, downing of the ball when the offense’s forward progress is
stopped, a down-and-distance concept in which teams must turn the ball over if they did not gain

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five yards in three attempts, and the legalization of low tackles (Rader 89-91). These new rules
allowed for a less random, more strategic, action-packed and dangerous version of rugby to
develop, and brought about a game that many Americans would begin to recognize today as
having an increasing resemblance to modern American football. This new sport developed in the
aforementioned culture of Social Darwinism, in which people were constantly searching for a
way to demonstrate that they were more fit for survival than the next man, allowing
intercollegiate competition to begin to grow on a new front. This concept of intercollegiate
competition, which began with the introduction of the first multi-school regatta in which Harvard
and Yale squared off in front of a crowd of roughly 1000 people in 1852, developed to include
large spectacles viewed by the masses in growing stadiums due in large part to Camp’s
innovation to the game of football (Rader 85). As Michael Oriard expresses in his book Reading
Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle, “After 1885, and more and
more conspicuously through the 1890s, [the] Harvard-Yale [football game] became the Big
Game… The report on the Harvard-Yale game in 1897 exceeded the excesses even of Hearst’s
Journal: six wildly illustrated pages spread throughout the paper, making it virtually impossible
to ignore the game” (124). This Harvard-Yale led culture of intercollegiate competition led to
colleges trying to stack themselves up to these two prestigious institutions’ precedent of
excellence on the field, but not to much avail. Spectators seeking to establish high social
standing did everything in their power to associate themselves with these increasingly
distinguished institutions of higher learning, even if they had never attended any sort of college
or university (Rader 92, 97). On top of his impact on establishing a culture of intense
intercollegiate competition, Camp also played a vital role in taking more control over the world
of sport away from the athletes and putting it increasingly in the hands of professional executives
who, like Camp, were able to gain increasing influence over the organization of the sporting

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world. As college athletes became more caught up in the now inherent competitive nature of
their sport of football, they began to seek help from former players, whom they began to invite
back to their universities to become “graduate coaches.” Yale, in its constant culture of raising
the bar, allowed Walter Camp to step in as “[t]he regular advisor to Yale captains and graduate
coaches” around 1885 (Rader 92). Walter Camp wanted to influence the culture all around him
and to mold the mindsets of the masses in a myriad of ways, and he used his involvement in the
world of sport to fulfill that purpose.
Some may argue that sport should be used only for recreation, or to generate revenue, or
to keep one’s body in peak physical condition, but sport is used for far more than that. In its
purest form, sport is used to develop a person’s morals and values, project their ultimate intended
life purpose, and display their very essence. No other cultural phenomenon can bring so many
different ideas about the world together and simultaneously combine deep debate with a strong
sense of unity in quite the same way as the world of sport. Some may view sports as a collection
of individuals running around senselessly, but as Theodore Roosevelt, John L. Sullivan, and
Walter Camp would likely agree, I would argue that they are much more than that.

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Works Cited
Gorn, Elliot J. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 2010. Print.
Oriard, Michael. Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Print.
Rader, Benjamin G. American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised
Sports. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. Print.