International rivalries became a new hurdle in the Olympic games.

Amid the celebration of the 30th Olympiad, it’s worthwhile recalling the 1908 London Olympics, and and how it changed the international games.

The Fourth Olympiad was the first truly international Olympic games held outside of Greece. It was the first Olympics to include winter events and women’s gymnastics. It introduced the rule that prohibited individual competitors; only members of national teams were allowed to participate.

And it was at the London Olympics that international squabble first began to intrude.

The feuding began at the opening ceremony, when the British Olympic committee failed to fly a U.S. flag over the stadium. The American athletes saw this and were furious. When the U.S. flag bearer marched past King Edward and the royal family, he refused to dip his flag in salute.

The British officials responded to this insult with a gesture intended to “restore the importance of the monarchy.” They changed the route of the marathon so that it would begin at Windsor Castle, directly beneath the windows of the Royal Nursery, and end at the royal box where the King awaited the winner. The fact that the new route  added another 195 meters to the race didn’t seem important. (In fact, this precedent caused the Olympic committee to change the 25-mile marathon to a 26-mile event.)

Opening ceremonies, April 27, 1908.

Soon the complaining and protests began. After the Americans lost to England in the tug-of-war, they protested that the British team’s shoes were illegal. The United States also protested the pole-vault regulations, the official medal count, and the set-up of the 800-meter and the 1,500-meter race. And American runners were outraged when the British disqualified the American winner of the 400-meter race for foul play.

Fans from the United States added to the situation: Throughout the games, they displayed what the British felt was raucous, partisan cheering and generally poor sportsmanship. It was particularly noticeable at the finish of the marathon, as the Post reported:

When the Italian had fallen and Hayes, the American, had won, several more Americans came in, pretty fresh, then some runners of other nationalities, and, finally, an Englishman arrived.

The Americans were very sore over the treatment they had received, they had heard nothing for days but boasts that an Englishman could win the Marathon, and when the English runner finally did appear, way back in the nick, an immense American, leaning far out of his box, bellowed through a megaphone:

“Welcome to our fair city!”

Dorando Pietri struggling to the finish line with a little help from his friends.

The marathon is a story in itself. The leader was Italian Dorando Pietri who entered the stadium within sight of the finish line, but collapsed repeatedly. Two British officials stepped forward and ‘helped’ Pietri across the finish line. It might not have been an intentional effort to prevent the American Johnny Hayes from winning, but the American team didn’t see it that way. The Irish-American Athletic Club protested vehemently. Pietri was disqualified. Hayes won the gold.

The American team complained so often about biased British judges that the International Olympic Committee made a ruling—another first!—that future games would use judges from several different countries in future games.

Today it’s surprising to read of the intense, often bitter rivalry between Britain and America. But in the early 1900s, America’s sudden emergence as a colonial power in the Pacific challenged Great Britain’s global dominance.

Americans were still considered by many (including the future King George V) as rude and overbearing. Many in England didn’t like the American women who were marrying English lords for their titles. And Americans didn’t like the $220 million of U.S. wealth that accompanied these brides to England to shore up their noble husband’s estates.

Johnny Hayes, American gold medalist, when he was still trying to catch up with Pietri

Many Americans felt it was patriotic to dislike the British, even 120 years after the Revolution. Irish-Americans, who made up a sizeable portion of our immigrants, had more recent grievances with the United Kingdom. And now that the United States saw a possibility of becoming a global power, it needed to show it was the equal of England, and would tolerate no hint of American inferiority.

So it’s not surprising to find an occasional slap at Britain in Post editorials, like “The Desire to Win” from 1905. The editors said Britain’s sportsmanship, like its military, had become decadent because it was no longer interested in “excelling in all things, small as well as great.”

Then, shortly before the London Olympics, the English Olympic committee announced it would closely examine the qualifications of American athletes to ensure they were truly amateurs. The Post’s editors responded with a blistering editorial:

This is a proper and timely advertisement of a promise to do full duty. We hope [it indicates] the committee’s courageous intentions regarding entries from its own country.

Certainly American sportsmen trust the English committee will give its home athletes a more thorough inspection, as to their ethical qualifications, than has been the case in any previous competition of an international character.

Some Americans have taken this announcement of the English committee as a bit of mud-slinging, but, if so intended, as I doubt, it may be overlooked as another Swettenhamism.*

*This refers to a recent dispute in Jamaica. When a hurricane struck the island, the admiral on a U.S. Navy vessel sent marines ashore to protect the property of Americans. The island’s British governor, Alexander Swettenham, issued a harsh criticism, which asked how America would like Royal marines landing in New York to protect British property. He was soon ordered to issue an apology, but Americans remained incensed for months afterward.

Americans who are familiar with the athletic conditions of the two countries will not take very seriously any covert attack by Englishmen, who are hardly in a position to indulge in the smallest character-besmirching foray.

Well-informed Britishers know, to their sorrow, the depth of their athletic degradation. Outside of the Oxford and Cambridge Universities, track athletics in England reek with professionalism and dishonesty. There is an athletic association which pretends to govern the amateur sport of Great Britain, but it has proved wholly incompetent. The bookmakers rule at track meets, and their corrupting influences upon certain (and the best, athletically speaking) grades of non-university athletes have swept over the half-hearted efforts of the governing body.

If the London Olympic committee lives up to its advertised intention, the English team will have few prominent athletes outside of those who are numbered on the university lists.

The situation is different in America, where the Amateur Athletic Union holds the lines in a firm grasp. Here track athletic laws are made comprehensive and are honestly enforced, which is more than can be said for England. We have our troubles, it is true, now and again—and man is not infallible on either side of the Atlantic.

It will be well, if for the protection of its own athletes, the American Union scans with careful eye the list of English non-university entries.

Johnny Hayes and Humphrey O'Sullivan

1908: The Olympics Get Political. And Commercial. The Saturday Evening Post

But with his Model T, things would be different. Ford would introduce a new design and business plan with the assumption that all Americans, not just the rich, wanted their own automobiles. He was ready to give them—

a 4-cylinder, 20 horsepower, five-passenger family car—powerful, speedy and enduring,—a car that looks good, and is as good as it looks.

His gamble paid off generously; in the first year, Ford sold 10,000 Model Ts—ten thousand new cars for a nation that previously had only 100,000 registered vehicles!

The Model T’s success was due, in part, to its superior engineering, including its use of Vanadium steel, a tough, lightweight alloy that kept the weight of the vehicle down to 1200 pounds.

Not an ounce of necessary weight sacrificed, not an ounce of dead weight in the car.

But no selling point was more important than price; the Model T sold for just $850 (about $20,000 today). As Ford proclaimed:

this big, roomy, powerful five-passenger touring car … possesses at least equal value with any “1909” car announced, and at the same time sells for several hundred dollars less than the lowest of the rest.

Compare … the new Ford car with those of any higher priced car offered and see if you can justify … the additional expenditure that buying any other car involves.*

Ford’s Model T began several revolutions. Of course it changed manufacturing and business

Click to enlarge the image.

methods. But his “car for the multitude,” as he called it, also revolutionized the nature of the American family and society. Middle-income families gained a new mobility and independence as well as new opportunities. Life would no longer center around the family hearthside and the neighborhood. Americans could now explore their country, escape their town or village, drive off to new opportunities, or follow their whim to speed down a country road.

Year after year, Ford compounded his success. His yearly production doubled and doubled again, from 20,000 to 53,000 then 94,000. By 1913, when production reached 225,000 Model Ts, he was turning out a new car every 3 minutes. Meanwhile, the price kept dropping, too; in 1916, he could afford to sell his car for just $360 ($7,000 today).

This productivity was only possible because of Ford’s assembly line, which—according to critics—forced workers into mindless labor at an inhuman pace. Furthermore, critics claimed, this mass-production culture was spreading across the nation along with the Model T. Americans were endlessly racing after dreams and living at a pace of life beyond human endurance.

Nonsense, Ford replied. In 1926, he defended the culture and production methods that the Model T had made possible.

There is [one] criticism that appears when modern industry is mentioned—the charge that machine-production methods, rapidity of operation, is responsible for the so-called killing pace of present-day life. In one breath industry is charged with making men stupid, and in the next with making men too nervously alert. Both statements cannot be correct.

How is one to reconcile the killing pace with the fact that the average of human life is lengthened year by year?

We live on a planet driving at terrific speed through space; is anyone nervously ruined by letting the earth carry him along? We are naturally habituated to the speed of the planet.

In just the same way, no one who is in step with the pace of industry is conscious of it. Irritation does not arise from the pull forward; it is in the pull back. Only those who try to check the pace of progress find our present gait distressful.

Our pace was made by ourselves. We are not forced to keep up with something superhumanly set for us. Man sets his own pace, and he can only do what is within the limit of his power.

The world is on the move and gives every evidence of an intention to keep moving and to hasten its pace. Viewed in the mass, the spectacle may seem feverish to those who are not a part of it. But from the point of view of the individual there is no sensation of being rushed. Rather the alert men and women of today are irritated by what is, to them, the slow gait of progress. Most of them are in a hurry to reach a better goal, and their ideas are becoming more and more definite as to where and why they are going. People are eager for the real education of experience. They are filled with creative curiosity.

The debate continued long afterward, and continues today. Does new technology make our lives both frantic and mind-numbing? Or does it bring into our lives new rewards and new possibilities? As in every revolution, both extremes come true.

(We can make that comparison today because automakers, in those ingenuous times, advertized their prices. So we know that, in 1909, a Franklin cost $3750; an Oldsmobile Roadster, $2750; the Winton Six, $3000; a Cadillac “Thirty,” $1400, and a Chalmers Detroit [which boasted they made only 9% profit on their cars], $1,500.)

Farmers added to the value of their Model T by adapting them to non-transportation uses as exaggerated, only slightly, in this cartoon. Country Gentleman, January 12, 1918 Click to enlarge the image.

The Ad that Launched a Revolution The Saturday Evening Post

Naturally the event prompted me to look through the archives for past reports about the oil industry. I found scores of stories on the subject spanning the past century. Taken altogether, these articles present a story of America’s troubled relationship with oil and its producers.

As early as 1908, for example, the Post was criticizing Standard Oil, particularly its Vice President John D. Archbold who announced his company would be more vocal in defending its reputation.

“It was entirely unnecessary for Mr. Archbold to urge upon his readers that the Standard Oil trust is a powerful and successful commercial organization, or that it has adopted many useful and important economies in the conduct of its extensive and diversified business.

“But his denial of the often repeated charge that the business success of the Standard Oil Trust has been largely contributed to by unlawful special favors from railroad companies can hardly be accepted as conclusive, contradicted as it is by testimony in numerous cases and investigations. And when the amount and frequency of these special privileges, which have been conclusively proven to exist, are considered, the statement is clearly justified that the ability of the Standard Oil trust to defeat competition and achieve its remarkable success has been due to illegal privileges from railroad companies more than to any other one cause.

“It has been proven that during the early period of its existence it had contracts with railroad companies by which it secured a rebate of from 10% to 68% on the published tariffs of the roads on all oil that it shipped. This would have been an advantage over competitors that would have satisfied the avarice of most people. But not the geniuses of the Standard Oil Trust. They demanded and received the same amount as a rebate upon the shipments of their competitors, who were compelled to pay the full tariff rate by the railroads.”

Historically, the Post was a tireless cheerleader for development and business success. Throughout the 1920s, it  heaped praise on every prospering American industry. But it never lost an ambivalence toward the oil industry.

For example, Post writer Samuel G. Blythe rhapsodized over the oil industry’s accomplishments in 1930. He proudly announced America’s oil production:

“The daily average oil output in the United States in 1929 was 3,196,000 barrels. Multiply that by 36, for oil wells, when they work, work every day. Thus we find that our total oil output in 1929 was 1,166,540,000 barrels. Almost one and one-sixth billions.”

“Oil is the giant of our national products… Oil is indispensible to our progress and prosperity. The use of it ramifies in nearly every commercial, manufacturing, distributing, motor, lubricative, heating and transport direction. It warms us and lights us. It runs our tractors and trucks and automobiles, pulls our passenger and freight trains on great railroad systems, propels our ships, whirls countless factory wheels, generates much of our power, fights our wars and flies our airplanes. The by-products of it are used in hundreds of utilitarian ways.”

Yet, at article’s end, Blythe drops his worshipful tone for one of stern warning against “the business idiocy of producing more than can be sold.” He encourages major oil-producing states to voluntarily curtail “wasteful and unneeded oil production.”

“the benefits have been clearly demonstrated. Oil can be conserved. Oil should be conserved, not because there isn’t plenty of oil but because it is sheer business lunacy not to recognize the imperative economic law of supply and demand.

“There is hope. Conservation will continue unless the oil producers are the biggest and greediest business jackasses the world has ever known.”

In a 1933 article, Harold Ickes, FDR’s new Secretary of the Interior, provided details about the wastefulness of oil exploration.

“One billion dollars is not an insignificant fortune even for the country that holds within its treasury most of the gold of the world. Yet the same people who would avidly scan tales of such a theft have permitted, practically unheeded, a loss in their oil resources amounting to much more than one billion dollars.

“We have suffered and are continuing to suffer stupendous losses in the exploitation of our oil resources. We are just as indifferent about oil as our forefather were about our forests, our plains and our streams. What if oil is being wasted? There will always be more oil; and even if it should, in time, give out, there will be plenty for our own needs in our own day. ‘May the devil take the hindmost’ is still sound American doctrine.

“I challenge any other present-day industry in the United States to show greater waste, inefficiency and mismanagement than seem to be inherent in the oil industry, whether of its own making or because of inadequate laws. These are grave charges, but they are less grave than the situation to which they relate.

The oil-drilling practices of the time, Ickes relates, encouraged drillers to grab up the easy oil, close to the surface, and leave behind the most costly oil.

“A quantity of oil on top can readily be skimmed off, and below, there is more oil clinging to rocklike sand, while still farther down in the lank there are coal and shale from which oil might be manufactured.

“If we drive a hole… a certain amount of the very cheapest oil will flow out naturally from the top. When the natural flow has ceased, it becomes necessary to install pumps in order to draw out the oil that remains stubbornly sticking to the rocklike sand. This makes the crude oil cost more. When this is gone it is now customary to abandon an oil field.

“But it may become necessary, expensive though the process will be, to go down and dig out the oil-saturated rock to wring from it oil which no pumps will bring up. It may even become necessary, at a still greater cost, to go to the bottom of our tank and dig out our coal and shale, from which, if the consumer will pay enough, it is possible to process motor fuels. “Already in many areas in the United States the cream from the top of the tank has been skimmed. The former great flush oil fields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, New York and Indiana are gone.

“Millions upon millions of barrels of oil have been allowed to become bogged in the earth’s reaches, beyond cheap recovery, because of the loss of the driving pressure of the gas.

Natural gas, rich in caloric energy, was the force that pushed oil to the earth’s surface. But the oil companies were little interested in natural gas at first. Once they realized it could be just as valuable as oil, they made efforts to capture it at the well head, instead of letting it escape into the atmosphere. However many get-rich-quick operations didn’t spare the time and money to capture this gas, but just grabbed the easy oil. The energy-rich gas was simply discarded.

“In the Panhandle of Texas, 1,000,000,000 cubic feet of gas a day go utterly to waste. Expert engineers estimate that the loss of this gas means that from 400,000,000 to 500,000,000 barrels of easily recoverable crude oil will stick in the sands. This is a direct loss of crude oil sufficient to supply the entire nation for approximately six months.

“From 200,000,000 to 250,000,000 barrels of gasoline could have been made from that crude oil. Enough is being lost in that one field to fill up every car in the country more than forty times.

“A year’s output of that wasted gas — 365,000,000,000 cubic feet — represents as much heat energy as 62,634,000 barrels of fuel oil—enough to heat the average home 1,252,680 years, or, to turn it around, to heat 1,252,680 homes a year. The staggering total of 62,634,000 barrels of fuel oil is difficult for most of us to grasp. But it would heat every home in Cleveland for three years. Dallas, Texas has 83,000 homes, every one of which could be heated for 132 months. Likewise every home in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, Providence, Erie, Lansing, Topeka and Racine could be kept warm for a whole twelve months’ year, not just the winter season.

“Some of the early wells in Michigan were allowed to spew 18,000,000 cubic feet of gas a day, each, into the air. Visualize the worth of that gas if piped into Detroit or Lansing to make automobiles, or into Chicago for use as fuel. Just as a measuring rod, consider that our capital city of Washington consumes for domestic and industrial purposes approximately 7,000,000,000 cubic feet of gas a year.

“My own opinion is that if the oil industry cannot control its affairs in the public interest, then the Federal Government, of necessity and to protect all the people, must take a hand. This business of oil is so important to all of us that private control must promptly and drastically mend its ways. We must, as a people, have oil, and plenty of it, at reasonable prices from our own wells. We cannot continue recklessly to pour this precious resource over the whole world. One can almost hear the sardonic laughter of nations, jealous of our prestige and covetous of our wealth, as they watch our headlong course toward national bankruptcy in oil while they count every drop of their own hoarded stores of this precious mineral.”

Over the next forty years, critics kept up their demands that oil companies use less wasteful methods. The companies had little interest in the arguments until the 1970s. To be fair, the oil companies would have had little incentive to reduce waste in the early 20th Century. As far as they could see, there was a nearly unlimited wealth of inexpensive oil in the 1930s — far more than would ever be needed by America’s 26 Million cars and trucks. (The number of vehicles has grown 1,000% since then.)

In 1970, though, America’s supply of cheap oil began to disappear, and we became more reliant on foreign oil. Suddenly the industry was working hard to extract every bit of oil and gas at every well head. And, as the oil executives, critics, and politicians had expected, energy prices rose.

I’ll close the first part of this Retrospective with a nostalgic glimpse at historic gasoline prices.

Oh, those happy days.

Read “This Billion Barrel Oil Country” by Samuel G. Blythe [PDF].

Read “After the Oil Deluge, What Price Gasoline?” by Harold Ickes [PDF].

Next:

America’s Common Wealth of Energy: The Long Battle for Oil Conservation

America’s Century of Oil Problems The Saturday Evening Post