Scientists staged a racist Olympics in 1904 to “prove” white superiority
But the participants of these “Anthropology Days” didn’t play along
Getting the Mbuti “Pygmies” to agree to participate in 1904’s racist pseudo-Olympics was a challenge. The competition, dubbed “Anthropology Days,” was designed to test the physical abilities of “primitive” indigenous people. Though the white organizers presumed that the competitors were less intelligent, they thought that their close connection to the natural world might give them a physical advantage. The event was planned to coincide with the 1904 Olympics and World’s Fair in St. Louis, at which a number of “human zoo” exhibits displaying groups of Mbuti, Native Americans, Filipinos, and others were featured.
But the competitors didn’t exactly perform as expected, especially the Mbuti. In the 440-yard dash, they showed more interest in the starting gun than in the race itself. In the 100-yard dash, they ran backwards and in wobbly figure eights. In the pole climb — the dry, not the greased version (Anthropology Days featured both) — one man attempted to remove his clothing before his ascent, while one of his teammates chased away a photographer.
At the time Anthropology Days was organized, belief in the racial superiority of white European descendants was mainstream. As foreign lands were increasingly pillaged by Western exploration and empire building, the public was regularly exposed to the “discovery” of new peoples and cultures in the media. Presented with objectifying terms like “pygmies” and Amazonian “cannibals,” their discovery “strengthened the identity of the West by defining ‘who we are not,’” writes Susan Brownell in her introduction to The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race and American Imperialism.
Like the American public, social scientists were complicit in the creation of racial and cultural hierarchies. Much of the research into indigenous peoples attempted to identify and categorize how “human” these humans really were. “Were dark-skinned peoples capable of discerning the color blue?” “How would native peoples react to optical illusions?” “How quickly would they respond to pain?” These were some of the many questions social scientists sought to answer, write Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume in their book Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo.
But perhaps the most important question of all at the turn of the 20th century was whether dark-skinned, “primitive” peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Americas were equal — both physically and intellectually — to Europeans and their white descendants. Many social scientists of the period believed indigenous people were intellectually inferior to whites. Some speculated that there was a spectrum of intelligence, on which the most primitive indigenous communities, those still in the Stone Age technologically, for example, were at the bottom. Other scholars posited that, whatever their intelligence, “savages,” like animals, were stronger and faster than white men, because they lived in closer proximity to nature. Others argued they were inferior in every respect. Figuring out which theory was true was the point of the 1904 Olympics.
James Sullivan, chief organizer of the Summer Olympics in 1904, firmly believed in the all-around superiority of white men and came up with a plan to confirm his ideas. At the turn of the 20th century, displays of indigenous peoples in human zoos were a popular part of circuses, traveling shows, and major expositions, and the 1904 World’s Fair was set to be one of the largest human zoos ever seen, with around 3,000 indigenous people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas living in mock “ethnic villages.” Sullivan’s proposal was to set up a special two-day Olympics pitting the “savages” against one another in both classic sporting events, like track and field, and events he assumed indigenous people would have a predisposition toward: stone throwing, mud fights, and blowgun shooting.
Sullivan brought his idea to Dr. W.J. McGee, a well respected scholar, president of the newly established American Anthropological Association (AAA), and head of the Department of Anthropology at the St. Louis World’s Fair. McGee believed that, because indigenous peoples lived in harmony with nature, they were endowed with special strength and abilities that white people simply didn’t have. Indians had “marvelous endurance” as long-distance runners, he asserted. Black South Africans had boundless stamina, Filipinos were remarkable climbers and divers, and the native men of Patagonia were agile and muscular. McGee was compelled by Sullivan’s idea, and the two began organizing the Anthropology Days.
Competitors for these “special Olympics” were recruited from the ethnic villages on the fairgrounds, including the massive Philippine “Reservation” and the Fair’s Indian School. They were paid to participate in trials, and the top finishers went on to the official event. The concept of a sporting competition appeared lost on some potential competitors, however. Even those who went on to the Anthropology Days seemed either to not fully understand the point of their participation or, if they did, to care little about the outcome.
On August 12 and 13, McGee, Sullivan, and hundreds of spectators gathered for the games. By all accounts, they were a massive failure. The Patagonian men, who were expected to dominate the shot put, given their large stature, performed so poorly that, in the words of Sullivan, “it astonished all who witnessed it.” Sprinters stopped the race just before arriving at the finish line, not only failing to break through the ribbon to win the competition but waiting for fellow competitors to join them before passing under the tape together. Only three of the 24 men in the javelin-throwing competition hit a 25-foot mark, and of the six men who agreed to attempt a 56-pound weight-throwing competition (three Patagonians and three Ainu from northern Japan), all refused a second attempt to better their score. At the tug-of-war, the Arapaho competitors arrived dressed in their finery, with no intention of being dragged through the mud.
In the eyes of its organizers, the biggest disappointment of all was that the event confirmed none of the era’s prevailing theories about the vast differences between “primitive” and “civilized” men. All it proved was that the participating natives either were ignorant of the rules, knew the rules but saw an opportunity to muddle them up, or simply didn’t have enough incentive to “perform.”
This was a blow to both men. McGee, who sought in his research to order the human “races” into hierarchical types, ranging from “living fossils” at the bottom to Western intellectuals at the apex, got little from the event to prove or disprove his theories. Though the indigenous men who participated in Anthropology Days did about as well on some events as children would have, their performances in the competitions were so ridiculous that even Sullivan couldn’t claim that it proved their all-around mental and physical inferiority as compared with athletes in the real Olympic Games.
Sullivan and McGee gave the games a second chance and organized a new competition for September, before which competitors would receive training and instruction in their sports. Thanks to better publicity, this time around 30,000 people showed up to watch the event, but the results remained unsatisfying. Despite this, in McGee’s estimation, although the competitions failed to measure “natural” ability, they established “in quantitative measure the inferiority of primitive peoples, in physical faculty if not in intellectual grasp.”
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