BackStory; U.S. vs. Them: Sports on the World Stage

This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers. It's been a dramatic few weeks for American soccer fans. Williams watched our team first do better than we expected, and then be eliminated by Belgium and the World Cup. Now, Americans aren't new to the triumphs and tears of the international arena. And today on the show, we'll recap some of the highlights. We've got the story of a Ragtag group of ping pong players who were blindsided by Cold War politics. One day, they're in Japan through the tournament, and 48 hours later, they're the first American delegation to enter Communist China. And the story of athletes who were accused of forcing ideology into what was supposed to be a politics-free zone. The Olympics had long been political, going back to the racial Olympics in St. Louis in 1904. The history of Americans competing on foreign shores. Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory, with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Bellow. And I'm Ed Ayers. Peter O'Neuf is traveling this week. Now, we're recording this on Friday, so Brian and I don't yet know who soccer squad is going to bring home the World Cup from Brazil this year. What we do know is that it's not going to be the home team, because Brazil's squad fizzled on Tuesday. And what's sure to go down is one of the most humiliating defeats in World Cup history. They were routed, in case you've forgotten, 7-1 by Germany. A result that has triggered a new round of commentary about all the other things that many Brazilians feel is not well with their country, from political corruption to the lack of social services, to the decision to host the tournament in the first place. It's the same kind of reaction that took place a couple of weeks earlier on the other side of the Atlantic. That's when the team from Ghana went down in a 2-1 loss against Portugal, and was thus eliminated from the World Cup.

It was right around this time that an NYU professor named Jonathan Zimmerman arrived in Ghana to teach at his university summer program there. This was John's seventh trip to Ghana, but he noticed right away that the mood this time was quite different. It can only be described as despondent. I mean, as soon as I got to Ghana, I touched down, and we're waiting for our bags at the baggage claim, and they don't appear for a very long time, and this guy next to me, a Canadian guy, he just sighs, and he says, you know, we can't do anything right. I mean, just look at the World Cup. I had a guy tell me that the football outcome shows the weakness of the country just like the national currency has been weakened. In the days leading up to their match against Portugal, Ghana's players had threatened to boycott the game until they got paid. Leading Ghana's president to charter a plane to Brazil with $3 million in cash in order to pay the team's players. This, combined with a separate incident in which two of Ghana's players were suspended for fighting, resulted in what Zimmerman described as a media narrative about indiscipline.

But of course, if the team had won, if they had succeeded against Portugal in advance, I think it's highly unlikely that anybody would be interpreting these losses through the prism of indiscipline or national embarrassment. Instead, they would be congratulating the team for overcoming all of this adversity and controversy. As an example, Zimmerman pointed to Nigeria, whose team did advance out of the first round. Zimmerman says this victory was widely interpreted as a strike against the terrorist group Boko Haram by a Nigerian press eager to frame a soccer victory as a sign of national destiny. And he pointed out that this tendency to interpret national character through outcomes on the playing field is hardly limited to Africa. So in 1972, when the U.S. lost in basketball to the Soviet Union, kind of wanted a great upsets in the history of the Olympics, they were narrative told on both sides that interpret this outcome via national character. So American said what there shows is the corruption of the communist system because there were all kinds of allegations that the referees, including a Bulgarian one, was somehow biased towards the communist system.

They don't have fair play. They don't have an even playing field. All these metaphors from sports that bled into the way we talked about communism. But of course, the Russian story was almost exactly the opposite. It was actually about how the communist system creates a kind of discipline and creates most of all a kind of teamwork that was able to overcome the individual brilliance of the American players. All of which got us wondering if the score of a game between two world class teams could just as easily go one way as it can go the other. What are we to make of the social and political issues that are so often linked to those scores of Brazil's investment in public infrastructure or of rampant corruption in Ghana? I put the question to Zimmerman. In this case, I think the soccer story brought out some very real concerns of the country, but at the same time, it shouldn't depend on what happens in the game. So, I think that the problems and the issues that come out during moments like this are often extremely illustrative and revealing of a country, but if Ghana has a corruption problem, it does. It's got one whether they defeat Portugal or lose to Portugal.

And it gets fascinating to me that so much could hinge on the goal count. That's Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor in New York University's Steinhardt School of Education. We'll post a link on our website to a piece he wrote for the New Republic about his observations from Ghana. Sports and the national character. Now, whether or not that connection really holds up to scrutiny is certainly a connection that's been made for a long time and a lot of places around the world and the US is no exception. So, for the rest of the hour today on backstory, we're going to be marking the final weekend of World Cup play with a look back on the history of Americans competing on the world stage and what those competitions have meant to people back home. But first, we're going to dial the clock back to the years before the American Revolution.

As you can imagine, this was a time before American athletes competed as Americans, but sports were already an important feature of social life in America. And the category of sports encompassed a surprisingly wide range of activity. All sorts of competitions, you know, in the colonial period, there's a reference to sport being a question of whether a man can smoke 100 pipes in the course of a day, which a man does in a Philadelphia tavern and then promptly dies before he can walk out. This is Kenneth Cohen, a historian of sports at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Ken told me that when it came to the things that we would more easily recognize the sports today, like horse racing or cock fighting, there were representative competitions going back as early as the 1720s when counties would go up against counties or one colony would challenge the other. And so I asked him if the revolution ushered in a new period when Americans competed in sports as Americans. Well, I don't know that the revolution actually sort of sparked national or international competition in some way.

That's still a long way off, but the revolution does sort of impinge on sport. Because the continental congress and a number of state legislatures ban a wide range of the sort of best known and most organized sporting activities in the period, claiming that these are a waste of resources, a waste of time, that they are an immoral distraction from the sort of pure cause of liberty. So after the revolution, it kind of goes through the crucible of saying, hey, not now, we're fighting a war, we're creating a nation. But then the sports reassert themselves, what does that look like, Ken? Yeah, and so that is actually in many ways more discursive or sort of in the language than it is in the actual act of participating in sports. Even through the revolutionary period, you find newspaper articles that sort of reference British imperial politics as a horse race in which the factions that support America are presented as sort of horses named Liberty or names that Americans would sort of identify with. There are the factions that oppose Americans, which are presented with horses with horrible names like changeling, you don't know what they're going to become and what they're going to do to you.

The Americans really do use sport as a metaphor, even though the actual activities are banned and to some extent become less frequent during the revolutionary period. Then carries through to the post war period and really begins to flourish when America fights Britain again in the war of 1812. The best example of this is a great political cartoon that shows James Madison boxing George the fourth and George the fourth is punched in the nose and he's actually streaming blood out of his nose in the cartoon. Madison is sort of saying, you know, you're you're overweight and out of shape and can't handle this fight. I'm sure it doesn't say and I'm five foot three and weigh 105 pounds, right? Right. And you're an entirely different weight class. So since in all sorts of ways, exactly. It's not the most pugilistic of our presidents. I would say you have all this kind of metaphorical use of sport does the reality of sport begin to catch up with this as the country sort of regains its balance after the war of 1812. Yeah. So I mean, it takes a while. These bands get lifted as America is reaching or enjoying an economic boom that does allow wealthier Americans to begin to fund and finance and organize larger scale sporting events.

And it's the moral critique against these activities certainly continues, but it gets less traction. People sort of look around and they say, well, we're doing fine. We can afford to do these kinds of things now. And so you really see a take off in these sort of regional representative events in terms of a series of north and south horse races starting in the 1820s, which get the most press and attract probably the largest crowds of any sporting events before the civil war. These are sort of presented as as section on regional events. It seems like a kind of a dangerous way to array competition at a time when the real competition of between slavery and free labor and the Republicans, the Democrats, whatever is brewing. Yeah, I think it could have been, but the way that sport is constructed by the folks who are funding these events really sort of bridges that gap and sport becomes a place where Americans can play out these tensions in a somewhat safer space, a safer way. And so the northern elite and the southern elite are both using these events to sort of rally support behind them within their regions in a very subtle, very political way. Yet it's important to recognize having said that there's not a whole lot of differences between the way the northerners and southerners approach these kinds of sporting events in the way they organize them.

There is a difference in the way they execute them. And so the races in particular reflect one of those primary differences, which is the labor system, where southerners primarily employ African-American slaves to ride their horses and northerners primarily, but not exclusively employ generally Irishmen to ride their horses, which of course really reflects that labor divide. But does so in a way, again, that's trying to rally the sort of general population behind their leaders and representatives from their region. So by the 1830s, 40s, the United States has sort of recovered its sporting mojo and sports are especially horse racing, seen to be quite common. And other venues, the United States is eager to project itself onto the world stage. Does this same thing happen in sport?

Yeah, I think all of this, you know, overall economic growth that we talked about in the first half of the 19th century has America sort of feeling its oats, right? You know, whether you're talking about theater and the search for a great American drama or whether you're talking about sporting events and trying to prove to the world that America is a mature and competitive country on the global scene, you do find a, you know, nationalism sort of sparking greater conversation. And so by the time you get to the 1840s and 1850s, Americans are trying to stage and challenge largely England to a range of sporting competitions. The first notable one of these is the America's Cup, the sailing competition that still exists today. But, you know, shortly on the heels of that, you have a chess prodigy Paul Morphe from New Orleans, who goes over to England and basically beats all the individual national champions around Europe who are willing to face him. And so he comes back sort of hailed as a world champion who's, you know, sort of placed America on the global sporting stage.

Now, I can't help but notice as a historian of the Civil War that a lot of this really seems to be picking up in the 1850s. Is there anything to be made of the fact that the United States is projecting itself as a unified nation abroad at the same time it's kind of coming apart at the seams at home? Yeah, I mean, for the same reason that we talk about so many of the regional and local events being staged in a way that sort of tries to tie local populations to local leaders or regional populations to regional leaders, you know, these representational sporting events, there's always a certain element of promoting domestic unity in one's own backyard as much as there is projecting some sort of identity or superiority against your opponent. And so that's certainly true in the 1850s and 1860s. There's a great quote from a newspaper covering Paul Morphe's chess tour. And when he comes back home, there's this great celebration. The newspaper says I'm going to quote here. They have come with fraternal impulses from the hills of New England, the rich regions of the Middle States, the flowery prairies of the illimitable West.

And from my own golden and sunny section, where the blue waves of the Gulf of Mexico swell up a constant coral symphony with the music of our national union, they come together as strangers, but they have met as brothers and friends. And so all of these supporters of chess from all corners of the country come together to support Paul Murphy, our national champion, which sort of speaks to our roots as a unified country. That's a great quote. Yeah. And so you can really see this being spun in a way to try to represent the fact that sporting culture does bridge these sectional divides, and it's a way in which leaders in both regions try to hold the pieces together over the course of the long sectional fission that ultimately results in the Civil War. Ken, thanks so much for explaining this complicated story to us. Thanks for having me. Ken of Cohen is a history professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland. He's currently at work on a book called They Will Have Their Game, How Sport Shape Democracy in Early America.

It's time for short break, but don't go away. When we get back, a cornet playing hip-sash-shaying American travels across the pond to challenge the British at their own game. You're listening to that story. We'll be back in a minute. We're back with backstory, the show that looks at history to explain the America of today. I'm Brian Ballot, and I'm Ed Ayers. We're marking the grand finale of the World Cup this weekend with a show about the history of Americans competing on the world stage. Our next story has to do with the sport that I recently learned was America's most popular spectator sport of the 1870s and 1880s. Brian, any guesses what that sport might be? Oh, come on Ed. This is first of all out of my century. I'm going with horse racing.

What's your logic on that? There were a lot of horses back then. We hadn't invented the car. I don't know. That's a very presentistic perspective. Let me give you some hints. This was a sport that involved competitions, lasting several days on end. It was so taxing in fact that many of the athletes who participated in it died young. Wow. Would you like to refine your answer? So taxing. Well, that rules out golf. You know, I'm going to forget curling too. You better tell me what it is. Competitive walking. You laugh. No, and it was perhaps you would laugh less if you knew it was called pedestrianism. And the most popular version of the sport, competitors would walk on an indoor track for six days straight. Oh, my God. An amazing. So pedestrianism is a subject of a recent book by Matthew Algeo. And he told me about huge numbers of people packing into arenas to watch the walking matches. Most of the big races took place at Madison Square Garden, the first Madison Square Garden in New York.

And because the race was continuous, people were coming and going all day, day and night. And so total attendance for the week might be, you know, a hundred thousand or more. These races were so popular that kids would imitate the walks of their favorite pedestrians. One of the most famous walkers was Edward Pason Weston. He was known for walking with exaggerated swinging hips, wearing flashy outfits and carrying a gold tip cane. Now, he made a name for himself by walking up and down and around the East Coast. But in 1875, he lost a big race out in Chicago. And that's when Weston decided to take his act overseas. He sailed to London to challenge William Perkins, the champion pedestrian of Britain to a 24-hour race. Now, the British really considered themselves the originators of the sport of pedestrianism. There had been a Scottish guy named Captain Barkley who'd famously walked a thousand miles, one mile every hour for a thousand consecutive hours, something like 41 days. This was in 1809. You know, it's many years later, but the Brits still considered themselves the inventors of the game, so to speak.

And they were very suspicious of Weston. For one thing, they didn't believe some of the records that he had claimed to set walking a hundred miles in 24 hours, for instance. They just thought maybe these were outright fabrications or, you know, there could be a problem measuring distance or time, that sort of thing. And also Weston got on their nerves because he kind of embodied everything that the Brits kind of hated about Americans. He was flashy. He was cocky. He would play the core net while he walked. And he was kind of like the Muhammad Ali of his era, very kind of divisive figure. He would really play it up to the crowd, ham it up. And again, this was really kind of not considered a sportsman like by the Brits. And so it sort of further added fuel to the fire of anti-Weston sentiment. And the British were also suspicious of sort of American stamina and athleticism in general, right? Yeah, there was an article in the Lancet, which is a medical journal, scientific journal, still published today, just before the first Weston race in London.

And I'm just going to read here. The journal said American athletes were far beyond other nations in their hygienic unwholesomeness, living habitually in their close stove heated rooms, bolting their food at railway speed, year by year Americans grow thinner, lighter and shorter lived. Wow. So I don't think the thinner part really applies anymore today, but we do probably still eat too quickly. But definitely, I mean, and the Lancet, I mean, that's a fairly respected medical journal, even in 1876. And they were pretty unequivocal that Americans were inferior in many ways, especially at athletics. So Weston's bringing quite a heavy burden, not only of his fancy clothing and gold tip cake, but also of suspicion that the United States never really would produce great athletes. It shows up there, 1876, challenges the English champion pedestrian. And then what happens?

Well, this is a match. It was a 24-hour race. And the long and the short of it is Weston won. He defeated Perkins. Perkins quit after just 65 miles. But Weston went on to walk 109 miles. It was said Perkins' feet were so blistered and he was so foot sore that it was literally impossible for him to keep walking. And so this really stunned the British. They were kind of flabbergasted, really. Not only that Weston had won, but that he had won so decisively. And did this change their mind? After this, they kind of slapped his other heads and said, oh, we were still mistaken. Americans of actor and wonderful natural athletes, which I think Americans today would believe that there's something about our landscape, the vast open spaces, the kind of the shoulder room that would actually make us more athletic. Was pedestrianism a turning point in that, you think?

It was a little bit actually because after Weston had his very successful series of exhibitions in London, one of the newspapers came out and basically apologized and said, it's true that Mr. Weston is no chicken. And it was interesting to see this gradual changing of attitudes. I think Weston had a lot to do with that. He proved Americans could compete on the international stage. Did people in the States show as much interest in the Western Perkins race as the Brits did? Yes, they did. The first trans-Atlantic cable had been laid. I think it was about 10 years before. And newspapers would print extra editions or have big chalkboards out front that they would do, you know, lap by lap updates of where the competitors stood in international athletic contests that you could follow in real time on both sides of the Atlantic. You know, I suppose I'm historian of 19th century America and I must admit Matthew, this is the first that I've ever heard of this. Why is that? How has this fallen out of our consciousness if it was so popular?

A couple of things. One, it was hurt by gambling scandals. There was also a doping scandal. Weston when he was in London was found to be chewing coca leaves during a race. And he just insisted this was on doctors orders. It was not meant to give him any advantage, of course. But there were reports of other other racers were using strict nine to stay awake. And so it became kind of almost a public health issue. There was a backlash. Ministers began sermonizing against pedestrianism. They thought it was excessive and abusive to the competitors. But the real answer to your question is that in the mid 1880s, around 1885, British guy, John Starley was his name. He invented the first safety bicycle. Just the bicycle we still use today. And these were fun to race for six days. And almost overnight, six day bicycle racing replaced pedestrianism as the most popular endurance sport. You know, I say pedestrianism was NASCAR at four miles an hour.

Well, with the six day bicycle race was NASCAR now. It was up to 15, 20 miles an hour. And you could have crashes. It was much more fun to watch, especially the fifth or six day. And everybody was so out of their mind with sleep deprivation. Matthew Algeho is the author of a pedestrianism when watching people walk was America's favorite spectator sport. Matthew spoke to us from his home in Mongolia. In the early 1920s, American women were coming into their own. They won their long battle for the right to vote. And more women were going to college, a booming economy meant new employment opportunities. Flappers were pushing the boundaries of female sexuality. American women were making great strides, but not in sports.

In 1922, a small group of female track and field athletes set out to change that situation. Despite inadequate training and a lack of national support, a team of 15 women sailed to France to participate in what was billed as the first international track meet for women. Backstory producer Kelly Jones has the story at 21 Lucille Godbold stood just over six feet tall. I think she probably looked more like her father than she looked like her mother. This is Jane Tuttle, a librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina. Lucille Godbold wasn't especially beautiful by 1920s standards, but that didn't matter. She had a wicked arm. At a track meet in her senior year, she broke the American record for the shot put. And so she was invited in May to take part in the tryouts for the first international track meet for women that was going to Paris in August. That track meet was a scheme designed by the French to establish women's track and field as an official Olympic event. In the early 20s, there were no standard Olympic sports for women. Some years, there would be golf or tennis. Others, there might be swimming or archery. There weren't any track and field events.

At home, the American Physical Education Association, the APA, discouraged women from track and field because they believed that lots of running and jumping could knock women's reproductive systems out of whack, making them unable to fulfill their primary social role as mothers. Competitive sports were thought to be too intense for educated ladies. They thought, emotionally, it was very tough on women to lose. And if you were in the elite of society who were actually going to college, track and field was not something that you needed to get involved in. But Dr. Harry Eaton Stewart, an American physiotherapist, didn't buy those claims. He wanted to prove the APA wrong. He asked for help from a group called the Amateur Athletic Union, who governed sports outside of schools. But they refused him. So he held his own tri-outs and his athletes organized bake-sales to fund the trip. On August 1st, 1922, Lucille Godbold and 14 other women set sail for Paris.

This is Lucille talking about the meat. Just before it began, each team marched around the field with one member carrying her nation's flag. I was chosen to carry Old Glory and believe me, I was proud to lead that American team around the track. Five teams competed that day. Great Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and the American underdogs. Though the other teams had all competed internationally before, the women on the US team had hardly any practice competing at home. In front of a crowd of 20,000 people, Lucille Godbold earned six medals in seven events and set a new world record in Shotput, unseating the French champion. She says, the announcer took me around and introduced me to all those thousands of people. In French, he might have been cussing me out for all I know. But as everybody clapped, I reckon it was all okay. I can see those Americans yelling now. They opened their mouths so wide, I was scared to death. A fear of the sun would warp their ribs or blister their totsels.

The US team came in second overall, losing only to Great Britain. The team's successes should have convinced the APA that women could achieve more than society had planned for them. And that women could handle competition. But actually went in the opposite direction. The fiscal education directors sort of dug in their heels even more. A lot of high schools and colleges suspended their track and field programs, and they sort of set out to put it into track and field. The team's successes in Paris did prove their point to the AAU, the group that governs sports outside of schools, who began to fund women's track and field teams the very next year. That paved the way for athletic superstars like Babe Diedrichson and Stella Walsh in the 30s and 40s to rise to fame without the help of college programs. And the French scheme eventually worked. Six years after the meet in Paris, five track and field events for women were included in the Olympics in Amsterdam.

It should have been a no-brainer, was a struggle. Instead of catapulting American women into the international sports arena, participating in the first international track meet for women, was a small hop step in jump on the road to equal play. That's Kelly Jones, one of our producers. We also heard from Jane Tuttle, a librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina. It's time for another short break. When we return, why two Olympic champions use their moment of spotlight to raise their fist in protest. You're listening to backstory. We'll be right back. This is backstory. I'm Brian Vallow. And I'm Mid-Ares. Today in the show, we're celebrating the grand finale of the World Cup with a look back at the history of the United States competing on the world stage.

We're going to turn now to one of the most iconic images from that history. It's from the summer Olympics of 1968 held in Mexico City. American runners Tommy Smith and John Carlos had just won the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter race. As they stood on the victory stand and received their medals, they bowed their heads and each held one of their fist, sheathed in a black glove up to the sky. And what would at the time have been recognized as a symbol for black power? It was a moment of silent, but powerful protest. And Tommy, can you tell us the significance of the black glove on the right hand and the black socks that you've been wearing? The black glove is in black America and it's sort of the black socks. I'm proud to be a black man and all my people back home know that it's very significant. The symbolism didn't stop there. Smith and Carlos came to the victory stand shoeless to represent the poverty of lifting black people in America. Smith wore a black scarf to represent black pride and Carlos uncipped his tracksuit revealing a necklace of beads that memorialized victims of lynching.

And both men as well as the white medalists from Australia wore buttons for an organization called the Olympic Project for Human Rights. The organization had formed the previous fall and they had originally favored an Olympic boycott by athletes. Their demands were that South Africa and Rhodesia be uninvited from the games, that the heavyweight title that had been stripped from Muhammad Ali for refusing military service be restored, that the long time president of the International Olympic Committee stepped down and that more African Americans be hired as assistant coaches. Harry Edwards had been a scholarship athlete with Tommy Smith at San Jose State. Edwards returned there to teach in 1968 and spearheaded the Olympic Project for Human Rights. I sat down with Edwards recently and asked him about Smith and Carlos's famous active protest on the victory stand. Well, the immediate results was a tremendous bullying cat calls. There were a lot of United States citizens at the games in Mexico City and easily accessible Olympic games and they took tremendous exception at the gesture by Thomas Smith and John Carlos.

They were banned from the Olympic village and then shipped out of Mexico a day and a half later by the United States Olympic Committee. Once they got here, the death threats and so forth began to roll in. I mean, it's very, very difficult to understand the kind of courage that it took for these two men to do what they did and there was even some confusion in the African American community about the appropriateness and so forth of what they did. Many African Americans assumed that sport was this citadel of interracial harmony and brotherhood and so when Smith and Carlos began to demonstrate and to protest, not just what was going on in society, but in sport itself, many black Americans did not understand, of course, over the years as more and more discussion and so forth came on about how black athletes began to demonstrate. Black athletes were often used and exploited to project and present one image while black people in this country were living another type of experience more and more black people came to understand that not only was the gesture that Smith and Carlos did from the Olympic podium appropriate.

It was absolutely necessary. I'm curious to know whether what Smith and Carlos did in 68 differed in any way from what other athletes had done before them. I think we have to understand that every generation of athletes protest within a context of their circumstances. At the time of the 20th century, African American athletes received virtually no coverage, much less adulation and applause for their athletic prowess in this country. They were in a constant struggle for legitimacy and so it was the international arena that this legitimacy typically was demonstrated and that was a profound form of protest. Whether it was Jesse Ones winning four gold medals in the 36 Olympics, Joe Lewis winning the heavyweight championship and the immediate post-war war to error, the struggle was for access, fighting for desegregation, becoming involved in a struggle for access.

And of course, you saw Jackie Robinson at the Brooklyn Dodgers being really the face of that struggle for access. By the 1960s, the struggle was for dignity and respect and equity of outcomes beyond the sports arena. So every generation struggle is different and it's within the context of the circumstances that they are confronted with. You know, the prominent athletes today who say we shouldn't be mixing sports and political protests and we definitely shouldn't be mixing them in huge venues like the World Cup or the Olympics. In light of your own history, what would you say to those people? We thought the Olympics were a not just an appropriate but a preferable form because it is the second most political form outside of the United Nations itself in the international arena.

Also, the Olympics had long been political, not just going back to the Nazi Olympics of 1936 but going back to the racial Olympics in St. Louis in 1904, where there was an effort to demonstrate white superiority over the non-white peoples of the world by literally cataloging scientifically the outcomes of races and so forth involving whites who competed against non-white people. So the games have long been political. George Farman, who was the heavyweight boxing champion of the 1968 Olympics, walked around the ring waving an American flag, which was a totally political gesture. No one in the United States Olympic Committee or in the international Olympic movement accused him of engaging in politics when it was crystal clear that that gesture was in response to Smith and Carlos. So celebratory politics is just fine. It's only the oppositional politics that draws a kind of attention and criticism that Smith and Carlos did.

Absolutely. I mean, this notion that somebody told me, well, Dr. Edwards, I understand what you were trying to do, but we shouldn't expose our dirty laundry to the world. Well, every time someone was lynched, it was on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. When Dr. King was shot, it was on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. That was airing our dirty laundry and we weren't protesting America. We were protesting racism and discrimination in America and demonstrating that we have the freedom and the right to protest far right, which is what America was supposed to be about. They should have been proud to have that on the front pages of newspapers around the world as opposed to the deaths of three civil rights workers trying to register black people to vote in Mississippi are the pictures of a church that had been bombed where four little black girls were killed while they were praying. They should have been proud to have Smith and Carlos on the front pages instead of that. That was the airing of our dirty laundry as a nation and as a society.

Harry Edwards is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He's a consultant for the San Francisco 49ers and he's written numerous books about African American athletes, including the revolt of the black athlete. If you're just joining us, this is backstory. We're talking about the history of American athletics on the world stage and we're going to turn now to another unexpected moment from that history. Teams around the world had gathered in Nagoya, Japan for the 1971 world table tennis finals. Table tennis or ping pong often evoke thoughts of basement recrooms for Americans, but the sport was a big deal in Japan and China. Nevertheless, these championships were an unlikely setting for a major diplomatic breakthrough between two of the Cold War's biggest enemies.

As Bruce Wallace reports, however, that's exactly what happened. If you've heard anything about the events in April of 1971 that became known as ping pong diplomacy, you've probably heard about this. Matches were winding down for the day and a U.S. player stumbled onto the Chinese team's bus, thinking it was going back to his hotel. There were a few tense moments and then the American strikes up a conversation. His Chinese counterpart, the country's best player, Handsome Gift, is silk screened with an image of the Huangshan Mountains. It's this wonderful moment where these two athletes, one from Communist China and an American hippie from California, had this accidental meeting in the back of a bus, create this friendship, but that's just not the true version of the story. This is Nicholas Griffin, author of a book called Ping Pong Diplomacy. For the Chinese, this was a really methodical approach. The only person who didn't know what was going on was Glenn Cowan, the American hippie. Beijing had stage managed the event. Mao had been building China's ping pong team into a powerhouse. It became the vanguard of his soft power approach to improving the country's image abroad.

This was a very deliberate policy through the 1960s, so they would send the team out to countries they were interested in establishing foreign relations with, even before they had foreign relations. You could call them sort of sporting ambassadors. On the surface, relations between China and the US in 1971 were as bad as they'd ever been since Mao came to power in 1949. But Nixon and Mao had both secretly started seeing the other as a way out. China with a US ally could cool down a growing Soviet threat, and China might give the US leverage in their stalled peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Of course, neither side could officially acknowledge this. Unless Mao and Chinese premier Joe and Li reasoned, they could first manufacture a very public, very friendly, and very benign exchange between the two countries, which brings us back to the bus in Japan. Glenn Cowan and his Chinese counterpart stepped down from it and are surrounded by a scrum of journalists. One asked Cowan if his team would be interested in visiting China. The long hair says sure, and two days later, they were headed to Beijing for some friendly matches.

The Americans had no idea what was about to happen to them. One day, in America, then they were in Japan for a few days for the tournament, and 48 hours later, they're the first American delegation to enter Communist China. I mean, these guys know nothing about China. There's no reason they should. We flew to Hong Kong, we took the train to the border, and we walked across the border before we got on another train. Judy Bohinsky was at 15, the youngest of the US players. Walking across the border was like being in a movie. There was this really dramatic, patriotic music playing, and it just looked different, and everything smelled different, and it was just like something that I'd never seen before. The arena in Beijing was packed for their exhibition games with the Chinese, but the crowd was different than the ones Bohinsky was used to in the US. Here, it's just people are very individual. They scream, they yell, they clap at all different times. In China, at that time, in 1971, it seemed like everything was in unison. Everybody clapped at the same time, or stopped at the same time.

Bohinsky won three of her four matches, and says it was totally obvious that her opponent was letting her win. The team was also whisked around the country, walking on the Great Wall and petting water buffalo to come in. Bohinsky says, everywhere she went, she saw pictures of Mao and signs with different political slogans. There were some that were in English, and I remember one, well, because I have a picture of myself standing in front of the sign, and it said, people of the world unite and defeat the US aggressors and all their running dogs. And when we asked, though, why do you have the sign? And they would say, oh, well, they make a distinction between our government and our people. What Bohinsky and her teammates didn't see as they toured the country was how this trip was playing back home. Good evening. The Bamboo Kirk has been cracked by a ping pong ball. No ping pong team in world history has had so much attention as the American team now in China. The coverage it gets is extraordinary. On the first day that the American team is in China, there's not one, two, three, four. There are five articles in the New York Times, and none of them are in the sports section.

They're carried on the front pages of every newspaper in the world. The American team are catapulted to fame, but they're the only ones who don't know what's happening because, of course, they can't read any of this press because they're in communist China. As soon as we left China, we went out the same way we came in. We took a train to the border, walked across the border, got onto another train. And on this train, it was jam-packed full of reporters, and every square into that train was full. And we were getting elbows in the face, and cameras just right up in our face. And this global press attention is exactly what Mao and Nixon needed. The wonderful thing about this and why it worked so incredibly well is that it seemed utterly benign to Western press. I mean, it was ping-pong, how preposterous. But what it does is it changes the way Americans think about the Chinese rapidly. News of happy American kids hanging out with their Chinese counterparts had been beamed around the world. A photo of Judy Bohinsky and Jo and Lai shaking hands had been on the cover of newspapers everywhere.

Maybe the Chinese weren't so scary after all. So what it does is it creates this enormous amount of maneuvering room for the politicians to carry out their desires, because ultimately Mao and Nixon had been thinking along very similar lines for just over a year until that point, what it needed was a catalyst, and ping-pong was that catalyst. Three months later, Henry Kissinger flies to China for a secret meeting with Jo and Lai. In early 1972, Nixon makes his trip to China. All because they decided to give ping-pong a chance. That's Bruce Wallace in New York. You can see a photo of Judy Bohinsky on her 1971 tour of China at BackstoryRadio.org. You know, Brian is certainly the case that we're used to the arts playing a diplomatic role and we're even used to the exchange of athletic teams of different levels helping knit countries together. But I can't really think of another instance in which a sport has played such a central diplomatic role as ping-pong diplomacy did.

Now, why do you think that this was the singular example of sport being used to really do the heavy lifting of international diplomacy? And I think that there are two reasons here. One is that the gap between the United States and the People's Republic of China politically simply seemed insurmountable. The Soviet Union, as you know, was our bitter enemy throughout the Cold War, but for the most part we talked to the Soviet Union. We even negotiated settlements with them from time to time. We simply had no relationship with the People's Republic of China. There was nothing there. There was nothing to work with there. The second reason I think has to do with how little knowledge each society had about the other society. So something that's associated with regular people being at home in America's suburban life, like ping-pong, was very effective for getting the people on each side of this great divide, interested in each other curious about each other.

And of course, because each side knew nothing about each other, there was a great curiosity on both sides. You know, that's interesting, Brian, because it's certainly the case that the Americans and the Chinese not only did not know each other, what they did know about each other really led them to profoundly distrust each other. And it strikes me that it's not unlike the situation today with the United States and North Korea. And when you think about North Korea and sports, it's hard not to think about Dennis Rodman. So why isn't Dennis Rodman's sports diplomacy working? Well, I think Rodman is a great example. I think the whole Rodman incident shows how important formal diplomacy is. The fact of the matter is, nothing would have happened if Chairman Mao, who ran the People's Republic with an iron hand and Richard Nixon hadn't both for their own reasons, wanted to begin talking to each other

and move those countries a little bit closer to each other. That simply doesn't exist or appear to exist in the case of North Korea. And so Rodman can go over there, we can have feel good moments and they don't lead anywhere without the backing of the two countries that ultimately have to sit down and negotiate with each other. So sports are important, but sports are only a vehicle for other kinds of power. Well, that's right, Ed, but I also think we have this very strong belief that we can separate the two. You know, it's so common to hear, oh, we shouldn't pollute sports with politics. We got to keep politics out of sports. Well, as it turns out, it's hard to escape the long reach of politics. It pretty much penetrates most of what we do.

And it's pretty hard to escape the long reach of sports, too, so it's not surprising that they get entangled. I wouldn't argue about that, Ed. That's it for backstory this week. You can leave a comment at backstoryradio.org. We're also on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and SoundCloud. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger. Today's episode of backstory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Ernest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, Emily Charnock, and Bruce Wallace, with help from Sam Olmsteiner and Emily Gadig. Our engineer is Jamal Milner. Backstories executive producer is Andrew Wimba. Major support for backstories provided by an anonymous donor in University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Weinstein Properties, by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel. History made every day.

Brian Ballot is professor of history at the University of Virginia, Peter Ona of his professor of history in Meredith's at UVA, and Senior Research Fellow at Monicello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. Backstories was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.