Teddy Roosevelt was a keen boxer whose regular sparring at the White House left the president with a detached retina in his left eye. An impromptu celebration of Andrew Jackson’s inauguration got so rowdy that a Georgia congressman and his wife had to escape through a window.
But nothing resembling President Donald Trump’s Ultimate Fighting Championship extravaganza at the White House on Sunday has taken place at the People’s House before, historians told HuffPost.
Typically reserved for the more sedate pleasures of the annual Easter Egg Roll, or slightly more energetic George W. Bush-hosted T-ball, the White South Lawn is being transformed into a modern-day Colosseum: an eight-sided wire-mesh cage, an overhead lighting rig called The Claw and bleacher seats to accommodate 4,000 people. As many as 100,000 could take in the battles from the nearby 52-acre public park.
The card of seven mixed-martial arts fights, likely to be bloody, is billed as part of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations. It also happens to coincide with Trump’s 80th birthday.
Sport and entertainment ― which the UFC combines ― are no strangers to the White House, though nothing has been attempted like Trump’s efforts to stage the first professional sports event on the grounds.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley points to Teddy Roosevelt as perhaps a progenitor. Roosevelt, who was president from 1901 to 1909, was a keen boxer who regularly sparred behind closed doors with aides, friends and even professional athletes while in office. Roosevelt was even partially blinded while boxing with one of his military aides, a fact he kept secret until he was out of office.
Brinkley, who wrote the acclaimed Teddy Roosevelt biography, “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America,” also sees loose parallels between the UFC fight and “TR” pioneering Japanese martial arts in the U.S.
Roosevelt won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War and became “an admirer of the Japanese.” In 1907, he invited the Japanese professional sumo wrestler, Hitachiyama Taniemon, to the White House to showcase the sport. Roosevelt apparently declined an offer of a bout.
Two years earlier, the president invited the celebrated martial artist and instructor, Yamashita Yoshitsugu, to the White House to provide a demonstration of jiu-jitsu. The president himself took part in the exhibition in the East Room.
“TR got very behind this extraordinary global athlete, a Japanese hero, to the point that Roosevelt would start learning jiu-jitsu in the White House,” Brinkley explained. “He would start sponsoring it, and he hired Yamashita Yoshitsugu to teach at the Naval Academy. Roosevelt wanted jiu-jitsu in our armed forces, that it should be another tool in our military training arsenal.”
With spectators watching, Brinkley says the events are “antecedent to what Trump’s doing but obviously wildly different.”
“It’s not that far a leap,” he says. “TR was courting Japan, and Trump’s is trying to entice his dwindling MAGA base.”
Manuel Balce Ceneta via Associated Press
Brinkley also points to “Hooverball” — a high-intensity game played by Herbert Hoover, president from 1929 to 1933 — taking place on the grounds of the White House as another presidential pastime that vaguely resembles Trump’s fighting showcase. The sport was akin to volleyball but played with a 4- to 6-pound medicine ball.
Comparisons can be drawn to the first Fourth of July celebration in 1801, at what was then the President’s House, and hosted by Thomas Jefferson, the third president, Brinkley says.
According to the White House Historical Association, the inaugural festival at the executive mansion included “horse races and cockfights and parades of the Washington Militia and other military companies” at the north grounds of the President’s Park.
Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, said this was the “opening salvo” in terms of making the White House a “focal point” for entertainment. The event kick-started an annual reception at the White House that continued for much of the nineteenth century.
Among the more raucous non-sporting events held at the White House was the notorious inauguration of Andrew Jackson in 1829, where more than 20,000 ordinary Americans from across the nation spontaneously descended on the capital. Jackson, the seventh president, also hosted a White House feeding frenzy when he invited the public to come to eat a 1,400-pound block of cheese.
Adam Smith, professor of U.S. political history at the University of Oxford, says Jackson’s post-inauguration “smash up,” where revelers were fueled by bowls of punch and whiskey, saw his supporters come away with “bits of the curtain cut off and bits of carpet” as souvenirs.
“In terms of the desecration of the executive mansion, a lot of the rhetoric and noise about it was probably quite similar [to the UFC fight],” said Smith, who hosts the “The Last Best Hope?” podcast.
He points out the White House has always been “a highly contested space” given its status as the People’s House.
“Every refurbishment, every remodeling that’s been done on the White House has attracted controversy of one kind or another,” Smith says, referring to Trump’s ballroom and other “beautification” projects, as well as the temporary UFC arena. “But nothing — I don’t think anything — on the scale of what we’re seeing now.”
KENT NISHIMURA via Getty Images
Smith says another way to look at the 250th anniversary celebrations is to compare the “staggering” differences in Trump’s approach to how Gerald Ford presided over the U.S. bicentennial in 1976.
“The Fourth of July, 1976, was not all about Gerald Ford,” says Smith. “He gave a speech at Independence Hall in which he talked about how far we’ve come as a country, but how much further we still had to go, and how there were still people in America today who didn’t have the full benefits of the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s just unimaginable that any Republican now would give that speech. And Donald Trump would certainly never give it.”
Edward Lengel, chief historian of the White House Historical Association during Trump’s first term, says “strange things” have long happened at the White House, from presidents behaving badly to housing a bizarre range of pets, and much of the entertainment has tended to be highbrow.
“There’s been [classical ballet dancer] Mikhail Baryshnikov swinging from the chandeliers, practically, and dancing on the table on the East Room,” said Lengel of the New York City Ballet Company performing for Jimmy Carter in 1979. The show was broadcast on PBS as part of the “In Performance at the White House” series.
Ira Schwarz via Associated Press
But he argues hosting a “vicious and violent sport” on the South Lawn in public “transcends the bounds of tastelessness, and it sullies the image of this country, and what the White House should represent.”
Lengel, whose grandfather was a professional wrestling referee and his father a boxer, thinks the Founding Fathers would have objected to a UFC fight.
“I’m a historian of the founders, on George Washington, and I know what Washington intended for the White House. I know what Thomas Jefferson intended,” said Lengel, who directed the Washington Papers Project, a large collection of the Washington family’s correspondence.
“Washington definitely believed that entertainment should take place at the White House, but he was very specific that that entertainment needed to be carefully managed, it needed to have an air of gravitas and ceremony and control, and it needed to lift up rather than drag down the public image of the presidency and of the nation. I think Washington was very careful to try to lift up the image of the president and the presidential office.”
“Is this the first time that a president has dragged down that image? No, of course not. But it’s doing it in a new way that I think would have repulsed the founders,” Lengel added.
Smith adds that Trump’s tendency to “hawk the White House around” would have alarmed the founders more. Last month, HuffPost reported Trump purchased stock in TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of UFC, while promoting the UFC Freedom 250 event.
“I think what would have appalled them is the overt ways in which Trump is personally profiting from being in the White House from being president,” he said. “This would have been easily intelligible in an 18th century small ‘r’ republican framework.”
The Trump administration defended the transformation of the White House for the purposes of the UFC cage fights when responding to a lawsuit that called the plan “deeply corrupt,” and argued corporations “are clambering over each other to see their brands plastered adjacent to the Executive Residence and Reflecting Pool.”
The government’s opposition filing said an ice-skating rink was erected on the South Lawn, and Elton John performed on the same space during Joe Biden’s presidency, and Barack Obama “regularly put on exhibitions at the White House” and hosted a Beyoncé concert.
“No one raised a cavil at the Biden ice-rink or Elton John stage,” the government said.