Was Theodore Roosevelt the first U.S. president to run a cross-country race? The evidence is circumstantial but intriguing. What’s certain is Roosevelt’s enduring influence on amateur athletics of all sorts, including competitive running—and that’s a story well worth telling.

The iconic Roosevelt had a larger-than-life persona. Bull Moose, statesman, writer, explorer, soldier, naturalist, and 26th President of the United States, “Teddy” Roosevelt is also remembered for his progressive politics and penchant for adventure.

The thought that Roosevelt may have been a cross-country runner comes from sportswriter Ronald A. Smith. In his 1988 book Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics, Smith teases us with this detail:

“It is possible that president Teddy Roosevelt participated in this chase, as he was a friend of Bacon’s and in his senior year at Harvard. Later, Bacon became Roosevelt’s presidential secretary in the early 1900s…”

Smith is referring to a 10-mile paper chase held in December, 1879. Popular Harvard football captain Robert Bacon was one of the 40-plus participants. But first, some history:

The 19th century version of cross-country running, which took the form of the game Hare-and-Hounds, or the Paper Chase, landed at American colleges and universities along the East Coast well before it was standardized by more reputable athletic clubs. Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a popular book among young men at the time, glorified the game hare and hounds as a feature of Rugby School in England.

It was in the Amherst College University Quarterly II that a Harvard graduate, William Blaikie, first touts the enjoyment of the game in 1860, saying the influence on American college sport by Thomas Hughes and Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was “greater, perhaps, than that of any other Englishman.” It was in the same year, 1860 that hare and hounds was the “rage” at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.

But there and elsewhere, interest was sporadic until organized track meets began to spread in the later 1870s. Yale students tried hare and hounds in 1870, although it seems to have died almost as soon as it was introduced.

Harvard first experimented with hare and hounds in 1876, just one week before the inaugural Thanksgiving Day championship football game. Harvard hares were given a fifteen-minute start, trailing a paper “scent” over a seven-mile course around Cambridge, and the run included jumping fences, running through backyards, and evading irritated property owners and their dogs. Further adventures with the game stopped for three years, until the Harvard Athletic Association sponsored the 1879 race that Smith mentioned, which included Bacon (and possibly Roosevelt). It took until 1881, however, before Harvard initiated a formal paper-chasing club—introduced by Charles Brandt, a future captain of the New York Hare and Hounds Club.

Back to 1879 and Robert Bacon. The New York Times covered the Harvard hare and hound meet, listing six runners by name. Richard Trimble (class of 1880) was noted as captain, and was one of two hares. Thacher (’82), was the second hare. Thorndike (’81), was the first finisher, with Hall (’80) and Freeland (’81) listed “of the Varsity” having “closely pressed” Thorndike to the end. The sixth named runner, under the title of “Whipper-In,” was Robert Bacon, class of 1880.

Robert Bacon was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on July 5, 1860. Dr. Henry Jackson, a lifelong friend, remembered Bacon fondly:

“He made many and warm friends in all walks of life; he could not make an enemy. He was much interested in all athletic sports, rather from a real love of all outdoor activities than from a wish to excel in any one branch. His superb physique placed him in a position to excel in any sport that he was interested in. “Bacon was rusher on the Freshman football eleven (or rather fifteen as it was at that time), first base and captain of the Freshman baseball team, a member of the University football team, and one year its captain, winner in heavyweight sparring, one hundred yard dash and quarter mile run, and rowed number seven on the University crew… “He was in all respects the most popular man in the class, respected by all, beloved by many; success in athletics necessarily brings to a college man popularity of a certain kind; his popularity was deeper, more lasting, dependent not upon his success as an athlete, but upon the deep respect and devotion due to a man of fine character who was modest, kindly to all, generous, and possessed of a sunny, jovial disposition.”

If Jackson’s description of Bacon seems over-friendly, Walter Camp, the respected football authority (and as loyal to Yale as Bacon was to Harvard), can’t be accused of partiality. Camp wrote:

“In the spring of 1877, a tall crinkly haired blond giant, handsome as an Adonis, captained the Harvard Freshman baseball team. Four years later, thickened up, and grown more stalwart through work on the gridiron and the river, this same handsome giant stood on the field in a crimson jersey as captain of the Harvard football team. Robert Bacon was one of Harvard’s great athletes, and was not only respected by his opponents for his physical strength and agility but admired and held in deep and sincere affection by them all for his love of sport and fair play.”

Roosevelt described Bacon as “the handsomest man in the Class and is as pleasant as he is handsome.”

A biographer of Roosevelt later compared the two men: “Handsome, god-like Bob, who so overshadowed pale Teddy in the Harvard class of ’80!”

As noted above, their Harvard acquaintance eventually led Roosevelt to hire Bacon as his presidential secretary.

It’s speculation to imagine that Bacon may have roped Roosevelt into joining the Harvard hare and hounds meet in 1879. But there’s plenty of evidence to prove Roosevelt’s lifelong interest in competitive running.

One item is a 1906 White House letter to his son, Kermit, who was attending Groton. “Pay what attention you can to athletics. Play hockey, for instance, and try to get into shape for the mile run. I know it is too short a distance for you, but if you will try for the hare and hounds running and the mile, too, you may be able to try for the two miles when you go to Harvard.”

Kermit took his father’s advice. The Grotonian wrote: “The first hare and hounds run was held on Wednesday, November 27. The hares were Farr and K. Roosevelt. The trail, about five miles long, led through the woods to a point about a mile beyond the Red Bridge, returning across the fields.”

A second item tying Theodore Roosevelt to cross-country was the fact that he was a member of Harvard’s Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the same group that organized hare and hound events. In 1879 the Harvard Crimson wrote that the university would “be represented by Mr. Roosevelt, ‘80, and Mr. Twombley, '79.”

A third indication of Roosevelt’s ties to cross-country running was his friendship with Arthur Blake, a Harvard grad who was well-known in Boston for running the mile and running in hare and hounds races before becoming a member of the first U.S. Olympic team. In the book Igniting the Flame: America’s First Olympic Team, author Jim Reisler mentions that Arthur’s mother was a noted poet and novelist, with a string of admirers which included Roosevelt.

Roosevelt’s tastes, his energy, and his enthusiasm set him off from his fellow students at Harvard. And his energy served him well, for it brought him closer to his peers. Though not a great, or even a good college athlete, Roosevelt loved to exercise. Endurance became a focus with him, and he enjoyed outdoing his friends. Of course he was also an earnest fan of Harvard rowing, baseball, and football.

Classmate Richard Welling recalled that he and Roosevelt often had endurance contests. Once they were skating on a bitterly cold afternoon at Fresh Pond. Their hands, ears, and toes were freezing; the ice was rough; and they were both poor skaters. There was no chance for a real chat, but Roosevelt kept saying, “Isn’t this perfectly bully?” Not to be outdone, Welling forced himself to agree. “I gritted my teeth,” Welling said later, “resolved not to be the first to quit. It took every ounce of grit in me. One hour we skated or scuffled about, then a second hour, and not until well on into the third, with obvious regret, did he suggest home.”

Roosevelt had been a sickly child, afflicted with severe asthma, and found that rigorous physical activity alleviated both his symptoms and sense of helplessness. He logged long hours at Wood’s Gymnasium in New York City and took boxing lessons. For a time he lived out West and became a skilled and avid hunter, bristling at any suggestion that he was a blue-blooded dandy. While Roosevelt was too short and slight to play football, he still developed an affinity for the game after he entered Harvard in 1876. It required, he wrote, “the greatest exercise of fine moral qualities, such as resolution, courage, endurance, and capacity to hold one’s own and stand up under punishment.”

When a crusade against football gained momentum, Roosevelt penned an impassioned defense of the sport. “The sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a certain slight element of risk,” he wrote in Harper’s Weekly in 1893. “It is mere unmanly folly to try to do away with the sport because the risk exists.” It would be on October 9, 1905, that Roosevelt convened a football summit at the White House. Attendees included Secretary of State Elihu Root, as well as athletic directors and coaches from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Less than a year later, 62 institutions became charter members of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (later renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association). Roosevelt has been linked to the formation of the N.C.A.A. ever since.

Like Roosevelt, Harvard at the time was in transition. New university president Charles Eliot, young and full of ideas, wanted to update the traditional institution and turn it into a “modern” university. While Harvard enjoyed a reputation as a fine school, it was also viewed as a place concerned as much with athletics and social skills as it was with academics. A story in the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, published in November of Roosevelt’s senior year, said as much:

“The chief distinctions achieved by a certain class of Harvard students, during the past few years, have been in connection with baseball, boat racing, bicycling and other sporting accomplishments in which brawn comes to the fore and the brain retires in the background. In fact, this ‘description’ of the Harvard student, as he makes himself most familiar to the public, is an immature being, more gifted with brawn than with brains. His profoundest aspiration, next to his desire to appear a full-grown man, seems to run in the direction of muscular accomplishment.”

As someone zealously attempting to remake himself into a man of action, Roosevelt was comfortable with this glorification of brawn. Author Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote The Bully Pulpit, said Roosevelt “ran three or four miles a day” while at Harvard.

The list of intramurals that Roosevelt participated in was a long one, and whether or not hare and hounds was among them, there’s no question that he was a supporter of all Harvard athletics. His lifelong enthusiasm for sports, and his role in forming the N.C.A.A., reinforced America’s fascination with college athletics, influencing countless cross-country runners—and millions of other athletes in other sports as well.

Sources:

Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics By Ronald A. Smith (1988) : Link Here

“Chasing Harvard Hares” The New York Times, December 14, 1879 : Link Here

“Harvard Hares and Hounds” The New York Times, December 7, 1879 : Link Here

“Robert Bacon, Life and Letters” by James Brown Scott : Link Here

“Where Liberty Dwells, There Is My Country” by Craig Roberts Stapleton : Link Here

“Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children” : Link Here

“The Grotonian” : Link Here

“The Harvard Crimson” 1879 - mention of Roosevelt on Athletic Council : Link Here

“Igniting the Flame: America’s First Olympic Team” by Jim Reisler : Link Here

“Theodore Roosevelt at Harvard” The Harvard Crimson : Link Here

“Score One for Roosevelt” The Simthsonian Magazine : Link Here

“Becoming Teddy Roosevelt“ by Andrew Vietze : Link Here

“Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Work“ : Link Here

“The Bull Moose Runs” Runner’s World Magazine : Link Here

