Robert Garrett

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Medal record
Robert Garrett
Men's athletics
Competitor for the  United States
Olympic Games
Gold	1896 Athens	Shot put
Gold	1896 Athens	Discus throw
Silver	1896 Athens	High jump
Silver	1896 Athens	Long jump
Bronze	1900 Paris	Shot put
Bronze	1900 Paris	Standing triple jump

Robert S. Garrett (May 24, 1875 – April 25, 1961) was an American athlete. He was the first modern Olympic champion in discus throw and shot put.

[edit] Biography

Born in Baltimore County, Maryland, Garrett came from a wealthy family and studied in Princeton University. He excelled in track and field athletics as an undergraduate, and was captain of the Princeton track team in both his junior and senior years. Garrett was primarily a shot-putter, though he also competed in the jumping events. When he decided to compete in the first modern Olympics in 1896, Professor William Milligan Sloane suggested he should also try the discus.

They consulted classical authorities to develop a drawing and Garrett hired a blacksmith to make a discus. It weighed nearly 30 pounds (14 kg) and it was impossible to throw any distance, so he gave up on the idea. Garrett paid for his own and three classmates' (Francis Lane third in 100 m, Herbert Jamison second in 400 m, and Albert Tyler second in pole vault) way to Athens to compete in the Olympics. When he discovered that a real discus weighs less than five pounds, he decided to enter the event for fun.

[edit] 1896 Olympics

The Greek discus throwers were true stylists. Each throw, as they spun and rose from a classical Discobolus stance, was more beautiful than the last. Not so with Garrett, who seized the discus in his right hand and swinging himself around and around, the way the 16 pound hammer is usually thrown, threw the discus with tremendous force. Garrett's first two throws were embarrassingly clumsy. Instead of sailing parallel to the ground, the discus turned over and over and narrowly missed hitting some of the audience. Both foreigners and Americans laughed at his efforts and he joined in the general merriment. His final throw, however, punctuated with a loud grunt, sent the discus sailing 19 centimeters beyond the best Greek competitor's Panagiotis Paraskevopoulos's mark to 29.15 metres.

American spectator Burton Holmes wrote: "All were stupefied. The Greeks had been defeated at their own classic exercise. They were overwhelmed by the superior skill and daring of the Americans, to whom they ascribed a supernatural invincibility enabling them to dispense with training and to win at games which they had never before seen." The performances were remarkable. According to James Connolly, in five of the track and field events won by Americans, they had not had a single day of outdoor practice since the previous fall.

Garrett also won the shot put with a distance of 11.22 metres and finished second in the high jump (tied equally with James Connolly at 1.65 metres) and second in the long jump (with a jump of 6.00 metres).

[edit] 1900 Olympics

In the 1900 Olympics, Garrett placed third in the shot put and the standing triple jump. His bronze medal in the shot put was especially impressive, as he refused to compete in the final due to it being held on a Sunday. His qualifying mark was good enough to place him in third. He also competed in the discus throw again, but due to a poorly planned course was unable to set a legal mark as his discus throws all hit trees.

Garrett was the IC4A shot put champion in 1897.

In addition, Garrett was a member of the Tug-of-War team at the 1900 Olympics that was unable to take part because three of its six members were engaged in the hammer throw.

[edit] Life after Olympics

Later he became a banker and donator to science, especially to history and archeology. He helped to organize and finance an archaeological expedition to Syria, led by Dr. John M. T. Finney. From 1932 to 1939, he was involved with the Committee for the Excavation of Antioch and Its Vicinity both helping to fund the excavations and working on them. His hobby was collecting Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. In 1942 Garrett donated to Princeton University his collection of more than 11,000 manuscripts, including sixteen Byzantine Greek manuscripts, containing rare and beautiful examples of illuminated Byzantine art for the use of scholars. He was for many years a trustee of Princeton University and The Baltimore Museum of Art.

Garrett had amassed this collection of historical volumes of Western and non-Western manuscripts, fragments, and scrolls, originating from Europe, the Near East, Africa, Asia and Mesoamerica, ca. 1340 B.C.-1900s.

Garrett inherited his collecting interest from his father, Thomas Harrison Garrett, Princeton Class of 1868. After his father's sudden death in 1888, Garrett spent the following two and a half years traveling extensively with his mother and two brothers, Horatio and John, in Europe and the Near East. During his travels Garrett developed a particular interest in manuscripts and began collecting. He used the text Universal Paleography: or, Facsimiles of Writing of All Nations and Periods by J. B. Silvestre (by Sir Frederic Madden, London, 1949-50) as his guide for collecting primary examples of every known type of script.

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Robert Garrett was one of the primary financial sponsors of the American Eugenics Society the personal project of Wickliffe P. Draper who sponsored most of the research behind "The Bell Curve" published in 1994. Garrett also served on the Finance Committee of the International Congress of The American Eugenics Society along with Madison Grant author of "The Passing of the Great Race."

In 1930 in New York, many of the wealthiest people in the world were members of the American Eugenics Society.

It earliest members and sponsors included:

J. P. Morgan, Jr., chairman, U. S. Steel, who handled British contracts in the United States for food and munitions during World War I

Mrs. Mary Duke Biddle, tobacco fortune heiress whose family founded Duke University

Cleveland H. and Cleveland E. Dodge and their wives, who used some of the huge fortune that Phelps Dodge & Company made on copper mines and other metals to support eugenics

Robert Garrett, whose family had amassed a fortune through banking in Maryland and the B&O railroad, who helped finance two international eugenics congresses

Miss E. B. Scripps, whose wealth came the Scrips-Howard newspaper chain and from United Press (later UPI)

Dorothy H. Brush, Planned Parenthood activist, whose wealth came from Charles Francis Brush (1849-1929), who invented the arc lamp for street lights and founded the Brush Electric Company

Margaret Sanger, who used the wealth of one of one of her husbands, Noah Slee, to promote her work. Slee made his fortune from the familiar household product, 3-in-One Oil.

The other Finance Committee members included: Leon F. Whitney the great-grandson of Eli Whitney inventor of the Cotton Gin who was the Chairman; Frank L. Babbott the well-known philanthropist and educator, Madison Grant later of The Pioneer Fund, founded by Wickliffe Draper following the 1936 Olympics when his nephew, Floyd Draper, was edged out for Olympic glory by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalf, Mrs. Helen Hartley Jenkins, a philanthropist from the Phelps-Dodge, Remington Arms and DuPont Chemical families, and John H. Kellogg who owned the Kellogg's Cereal Company. Garrett's associates on the Finance Committee later promoted some very controversial population control schemes. Leon Whitney proposed sterilizing 10,000,000 "hereditary defectives" against their will (almost 10% of the entire population of the USA at the time) which was also supported by Wickliffe Draper and Madison Grant, known as "America's most influential racist". Grant continuously proposed segregation of undesirable minority populations in "ghettos" encircled by barbed wire fences and armed guards. He also helped to pass several Anti-Miscegnation Laws in Virginia and elsewhere. John Kellogg later supported some of the more extreme measures of Birth Control including total abstinence, discouragement of onanism, and even sexual mutilation. Kellogg was also very outspoken on his beliefs about segregation. In 1906, Kellogg founded The Race Betterment Foundation along with Charles Davenport, which became a major center of influence for the new Eugenics movement in America. Kellogg was in favor of complete racial segregation and firmly believed that both immigrants, especially non-whites would severely damage the gene pool and lead to the diminuition of the domination of the white Anglo-Saxons in America.

And Robert Garrett once proposed limiting the growth of the US population in direct proportion to the growth of the Money Supply ostensibly in order to assure adequate employment opportunities at a fair, living wage standard. Many of their "Progressive" proposals were actually put into practice later primarily through the efforts of Wickliffe Draper and his Pioneer Fund which lobbied successfully to pass Involuntary Sterilization Laws in almost 20 States which resulted in over 75,000 sterilizations being performed between 1924 and 1972 when the last of these laws were overturned. See: "Against Their Will" by Kevin Begos in the Winston-Salem Journal. Draper and his cohorts also supported various Anti-Immigration Laws including The Johnson Act of 1924.

As the supremacy of white athletes at the Olympics and elsewhere began to gradually fade away, the efforts of the American Eugenics Society were increased in order to attempt to retain that advantage. Draper and Prof. Henry Garrett of The Pioneer Fund, Robert's grand-nephew fought both Brown vs. Board of Education (School Desegregation) and The Civil Rights Act of 1964 using their memberships in The American Eugenics Society, The Pioneer Fund and The International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, but to no avail.

Robert Garrett died on April 25, 1961, in Baltimore, Maryland.

[edit] External links

• The Unexpected Olympians - How Harvard Dominated the First Modern Games - In Spite of Himself By Jonathan Shaw. An article in Harvard Magazine
• Amusing Then Amazing--American Wins Discus in 1896. An article by Thomas Curtis

[edit] References

• De Wael, Herman. Herman's Full Olympians: "Athletics 1900". Accessed 18 March 2006. Available electronically at [1].
• Mallon, Bill (1998). The 1900 Olympic Games, Results for All Competitors in All Events, with Commentary. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. ISBN 0-7864-0378-0. 
• Robert Garrett Papers, 1903-1949 (bulk 1920-1945), Princeton University Library, Manuscripts Division. [2].