I was referring to our previous president who, shall we say, mixed Affairs of State with Affairs of State.
Posted on 07/31/2005 5:06:20 PM PDT by West Coast Conservative
You're kidding right?
Was it something I missed?
Don't mean to sound ignorant.
Hmmmm...
He's NOT doing the work for the American people...
He's not spending time to nominate 'mainstrean' nominees...
He spends more time in the gym than on the job...
Bush ought to devote all that energy to the immigration problem...
Bush ought to expend all that energy on the Social Security problem...
Bush ought to utilize al that energy on the 'deficit' problem...
The American people are deprived of a working president...
Just a dumb jock...
Spends all his time in the gym...goes to bed early...
Is he ever in the Oval Office?...
I'm sure the MSM will fabricate many more...
I was referring to our previous president who, shall we say, mixed Affairs of State with Affairs of State.
Everybody has to have their own schtick.
I THINK in Freeper talk that Bill Clinton BJ Billy Jones LOL!
The old boy exercised strenuously. His problem was that he relieved stress by eating and when he was stressed he failed to exercise. He hit some 320+ as Sec War in 1905/6, when he was busy running Roosevelt's government. He dropped down to his natural adult weight of 250-280, but lost track of his regimen and eating during his presidency, when he peaked at about 350 lbs. He picked up his exercise regimen and ate better after he left office. All the weight changes wrought hard upon his heart.
There's an M.D. who has tracked Taft's health extensively, and that of other presidents:
Dr. ZebraHis research on Taft is impeccable, although his conclusions on Taft's presidency are flawed. (He wrote an article on Taft's sleep apnea, to which he blamed Taft's supposed failures.) Here for his page on Dubya.
johnb838, as x knows, I've tried my damnedest to refute the old stories of Taft's weight as the primary feature of his presidency... Here for a slice of it: Taft and Sleep Apnea
Heh, x, you forgot your < sarcasm> tag on this one: "Bush probably is more fit than Taft or Cleveland..." lol! There's still an old house along the C&O Canal that Cleveland enjoyed visiting -- and eating at, among pasttimes.
I know all about stress eating my own self. Gluttony seems to have replaced baseball as the national pastime.
I couldn't find a picture of Coolidge working out with his "mechanical horse" or "Indian clubs" -- bowling-pin shaped exercise weights -- but I did find a picture of "Hooverball," an invention of our 31st President and his doctor. It was a cross between tennis and volleyball played with a heavy medicine ball:
If it wasn't for the Great Depression we'd all be playing "Hooverball" now. It's probably just as well that it didn't catch on. The ball was very heavy, and could have crushed small children if they were forced to play it in gym class.
We like to think of fitness crazes as a product of our own time, but they've come and gone for at least a century. I would like to have been there when Teddy Roosevelt threw the Swiss Ambassador in a display of jujitsu. Apparently, Taft was one of TR's practice partners. Now if they had let best two out of three falls decide who got the nomination in 1912, would history have been different?
As with automobiles, Taft deliberately popularized golf. He made its popularity a goal of his presidency, as he saw in it great moral and physical benefit, especially for middle aged men. During the 1908 election he was ridiculed by opponents (and admonished by TR) for his golfing, which he called the most "democratic" of sports, for in golf it is every man against himself. There's been some good documentation of his golfing, but little credit given to him for its sudden popularity into his presidency. Following Taft's lead, various cities built public courses, and private clubs began to allow "professionals" -- aka caddies -- into tournaments.
As with golf and automobiles, so, too, with baseball. Walter Johnson recalled Taft's visit to his DC team in the Spring of 1909: "I'll never forget the first time President Taft appeared at our ball park," Johnson recalled, "...our players got so excited that we booted the game away to the Red Sox." Taft appeared at games across the country, and made it politically acceptable to watch and enjoy baseball which before then was considered lower class and crass. He received Ty Cobb at the White House and started the traditions of the 1st presidential pitch and the seventh inning stretch (there's a mixed history of that one, but Taft made it official by standing with the crowd during the "lucky seventh"). Even Congress followed Taft's lead and held Dem v Repub baseball matches, the highlight of which may well have been the 1911 game that was umpired by the sole non-Dim/Pubbie congressman, socialists Victor Berger. Under Taft, baseball attendance skyrocketed. No less than Fenway Park, Comiskey Park, Tiger Stadium, Griffith Stadium, the Polo Grounds, Ebbetts Field and Crosley Field were built or inaugurated during Taft’s presidency. In 1912, the president of the Chicago Cubs wrote him, "All persons interested in baseball appreciate the many good things that come to the sport because of the recognition received from you as chief ruler of the nation." I have spoken about this with the librarian at Cooperstown, who agreed with me on Taft's contribution to the sport.
Our friend Theodore was a priss and an elitist about the professional sports. Baseball in DC nearly died under his presidency, and not just because he banned summer hours of government employees that allowed them to make the 1st pitch. He never accepted invitations to the games and refused the various honors offered him by the League and the teams. Amateur and college sports were okay by him. The reason for it is that he considered pay for sports unmanly and uncouth.
In his search for votes, however, he took an opposite view. After attending a polo match and thus spiking the game's popularity, TR backed away from it for the patrician associations. He dropped it entirely. College football was okay by him, but only because it was non-professional and manly. Even so, he jumped in when he thought it was getting too violent. Thinking golf patrician, he never played the game or associatied himself with it. And he hid his own tennis playing for the same reason. (He was a rather awful tennis player.) Of Taft's golfing during the 1908 election, TR said, "I never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear. Besides, you never saw a photograph of me playing tennis. Photographs on horseback, yes, tennis, no, and golf is fatal." TR held in contempt anyone who was paid for playing sports. The sad story of Jim Thorpe is in line with Roosevelt's views on sports.
While TR is rightly associated with the 1900s fitness craze, he deliberately inhibited the growth of organized professional sports and the democratization of the "elitist" sports. If it were up to TR, the national sports craze would have been limited to horseback riding, jujitsu, and chopping wood. Taft brought golf, baseball and automobiles to the national consciousness.
As for the mechanical horse, I've seen references to it in various correspondences from the Taft period. For example, ocean liners made them available for guests to exercise on during voyages. (Taft rather disliked horseback riding, and only did it for the exercise. He was a good horseman, nonetheless.)
In my research I've obsessed on all this by way of example of the huge impact of TR's anti-automobilism and Taft's promotion of it. I remain convinced that Taft did as much as the Model T to bring the automobile to the nation. (Here for that story... Early Airplanes and Autos: the cultural lag)
Sorry for the long reply... it's always a good exercise, and I appreciate your pings. Hope all's well! - Nicollo
"No one puts on muscle easily at 60."
It can still be done though. When Ronald Reagan was in rehab after getting shot he had to get new suits. No, not fat, he hit the weight training hard, gained a LOT of muscle mass.
Apparently, TR saved football and helped create the NCAA. More here. They even named an award after him.
It does look like TR was caught up more in old fashioned ideas about "amateurs" versus "professionals," "gentlemen" versus "players." He was very much a man of his age in other things -- energetic, imperialistic, a promoter of change -- so it's strange to find him so old-fashioned about sport and transportation. You know more about it than I do. I suspect that he so wanted to focus national energies on politics and philanthropy that he had little interest in amusements and earning a living. And of course, like Wilson, TR feared all signs that the country was developing a "bread and circuses" or a "let them eat cake" attitude that would divide the classes and spark a revolution.
It looks as though Taft had a clearer vision of what 20th century America would be about -- variety, diversity, abundance, opportunity, and the enjoyment of affluence, rather than the puritanical emphasis on constraint and duty. Taft shared the old Protestant emphasis on duty with TR. In Roosevelt's case, it was filtered through Dutch Calvinism, Darwinian biology, philanthropy and militarism. Taft's immediate influences were Unitarianism and the legal profession, and these gave a different spin to the old WASP idea of service and responsibility, making it more open to the pleasures of life and less inclined to associate virtue with pain. History followed Taft rather than Teddy, but TR's counterargument would be that the enjoyment of private pleasures depended on the fulfillment public duties.
From what I can gather Taft's dad told him not to play baseball at Yale, so as to concentrate all his energies towards academics. Otherwise we might have had three Presidents (two Bushes and Taft) playing that game at that college. It would have been some kind of record, perhaps.
As for his salvation of football that's crap. In his usual way, TR seized upon news stories of excessive violence in college football, and came riding in like a savior to the game. There was nothing he did that the colleges hadn't already or wouldn't have done. The story of the creation of the NCAA is more to the point, and more along the TR legacy of nationalism and national organization. Again, though, it's uncertain it wouldn't have happened without him. I've spoken to historians who credit his National Governor's conference as the salvation of the republic. There is so much silliness attached to it, my mind bends. Ultimately, the guy was cheap. Don't worry, though, for TR was still heroic for some things -- and viciously flawed in so many others. I just won't stand for false credit.
I have some TR correspondence with the president of some amateur sports league, and he wails upon some poor s.o.b. who went pro. The man may as well have committed murder. That's the extent of his pyschopathy -- near pathology -- for the professional sports. There's no virtue in it. If I run across that letter I'll be sure to send it your way. You'll be amazed by the viciousness in it.
I so like your inclusion of TR's and Wilson's fear of "revolution". That, above all else, was their flaw. Not a few bad policies and legacies flow therefrom.
Indeed, Taft was the one who was unafraid of change, which rubs against every historical view of the man and his predecessor. Taft did play 1st base at Yale, although not for long. I don't know the specifics off-hand. His father did bitch at him for it.
Thanks for the links!
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