The Strenuous Life
"If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill. In 1898 we could not help being brought face to face with the problem of war with Spain. All we could decide was whether we should shrink like cowards from the contest, or enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spirited people; and, once in, whether failure or success should crown our banners. So it is now. We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall meet them in a way that will redound to the national credit, or whether we shall make of our dealings with these new problems a dark and shameful page in our history. To refuse to deal with them at all merely amounts to dealing with them badly. We have a given problem to solve. If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, always danger that we may not solve it aright; but to refuse to undertake the solution simply renders it certain that we cannot possibly solve it aright. The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills "stern men with empires in their brains"‹all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world's work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag. These are the men who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really worth leading." (1)
|
roller skating club
|
|
John L. Sullivan
|
|
"Gentleman Jim" Corbett
|
|
bicycle lithograph 1895
|
1862 - New Gymnastics for Men, Women, and Children by Dioclesian Lewis became the standard text for the cult of physical culture, used in schools, gyms, and the training of physical education teachers, described exercises with bean bags, hoops, the 4-foot pole, and bowling pin-shaped Indian clubs.
1876 - John Harvey Kellogg became director of the Medical and Surgical Sanitarium for "biologic living" founded in 1866 by Seventh Day Adventists at Battle Creek, dedicated to the vegetarian and whole wheat principles of Sylvester Graham, founder of America's first "clean living" movement in the 1830s.
1882 - John L. Sullivan began his long career as the champion bare-knuckle prizefighter, defeating Jake Kilrain in 1889 in 75 rounds over 2 hours in 100-degree heat in the woods near Richburg, Mississippi. However, such fights were illegal in most states. Boxing had long been associated with immigrant saloons and neighborhood gangs. But with the adoption of the Marquis of Queensberry rules, and the organization of fight exhibitions by chartered athletic clubs such as the Young Men's Gymnastic Club in New Orleans in 1889, boxing became increasingly popular as an urban spectator sport as did baseball. Thomas Eakins dramatized the sport in his painrting Between Rounds. The Army used boxing to train soldiers in World War I, and great urban stadiums such as Madison Square Garden institutionalized professional boxing.
1884 -The bicycle craze began with the "safety" bicycle of John Kemp Stanley, replacing the earlier roller skating fad of the 1870s; by the end of the decade, 312 companies were making 10 million bicycles for 100,000 cyclists in America.
1885 - The American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education was founded, led by Dudley Sargent of Harvard who trained Roosevelt and Lodge when they were undergraduates, and who taught that fitness was better achieved by athletic contest than gymnastics.
1885 - Luther Gulick was a disciple of Sargent who transformed the YMCA into a physical fitness organization promoting "muscular Christianity," and designed new YMCA facilities to include gyms and playing fields, and trained athletic directors such as James Naismith who developed the game of basketball in 1891 at the YMCA training school in Springfield MA.
Sources:
- quote from the speech by Theodore Roosevelt at the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April 10, 1899, reprinted in Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life; Essays and Addresses. New York: The Century Co., 1900, online from Bartleby.
- Schlereth, Thomas J. Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
