Sports and the American Presidency: From Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s love of golf adds him to a long line of presidents who have a close association with sports. Indeed, golf might just be the leading presidential pastime, ever since William Howard Taft was photographed strutting the links against the advice of his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt. And it was Roosevelt, more than any president, who set the standard for linking the nation’s top job to its favourite physical pastimes.

Starting with Roosevelt’s significant role in linking the presidency with fandom, advocacy of, and active participation in sports, this volume traces how occupants of the White House continued to develop these connections in various guises across the following century. Though historians have certainly not ignored such associations, the variety of case studies represented here provides a wider and more multidisciplinary selection of standpoints from which to assess the interactions between sports and the presidency than ever before.

Adam Burns is Head of Politics at Brighton College, UK. He is the author of American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the United States, 1783-2013 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), The United States: Reuniting a Nation, 1865-1920 (Routledge, 2020) and William Howard Taft and the Philippines: A Blueprint for Empire (University of Tennessee Press, 2020). He has also authored several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century US, including for the journal Sport History Review.

Rivers Gambrell is a research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. She is currently writing a book entitled Pigskin Politics: How Richard Nixon Reinvented the Presidency. She holds a doctorate in History from the University of Oxford, a Masters in Liberal Studies and Certificate in International Development Policy from Duke University, and a BA from Flagler College.