Since the opening of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, the international sports competition has only been canceled three times: once during World War I (1916) and twice during World War II (1940, 1944). Until the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, which postponed the Summer Olympic games for a year, the Olympics weathered politically charged boycotts and two separate terrorist attacks without being canceled or postponed during peacetime.
The 1916 Olympics were supposed to be hosted by the German Empire, which had built an impressive 30,000-seat stadium in Berlin for the event. But with the outbreak of war in 1914, and the eventual involvement of so many nations who sent athletes to the Olympics, the 1916 games were scrapped.
The 1920 games in Antwerp, Belgium were the first in which a nation was actively disinvited. Germany was blamed for starting World War I, and even though the country was under a new government—known as the Weimar Republic—Belgian, and later French Olympic officials banned German athletes from participating in both the 1920 and 1924 Olympics.
Twenty years after the canceled 1916 games, Germany was again due to host the Olympics in 1936, this time under the Nazi flag. In America, a coalition of Jewish and Catholic groups called on the U.S. Olympic Committee to boycott the games, but was ignored by the committee president Avery Brundage, a professed Germanophile.
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Instead, the 1936 Berlin Games were allowed to go on amid a Nazi regime intent on using sport to demonstrate Adolf Hitler’s theories of racial superiority. Jesse Owens, the African American track and field star, famously proved Hitler wrong, taking home four gold medals. In a lesser-known victory, India’s underdog field hockey team also crushed the Germans 8-1 in the men’s final.
The last time the Olympics were canceled was during World War II. The 1940 summer and winter Olympics were both scheduled to be held in Japan, the first non-Western country to host the games, but Japan forfeited its rights in 1937 when it went to war with China. The 1940 games were initially rebooked for Helsinki, Finland in the summer and the German town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the winter, but finally canceled in 1939 with Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
London was supposed to host the 1944 summer Olympics, but those were summarily canceled due to the ongoing war. Same for the 1944 winter games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. London eventually hosted the 1948 games, but banned German and Japanese athletes from participation.
Since its inception in 1894, the IOC has claimed to be an apolitical and neutral body with the mission to promote international peace and understanding through sport. But critics like David Goldblatt, professor of history at Pitzer College and author of The Games: A Global History of the Olympics, point to numerous times when Olympic officials turned a blind eye to violent human rights violations in order to ensure that the games went on.
Mexico City is a particularly damning example. Ten days before the 1968 summer games were set to open in Mexico City, government forces opened fire on crowds of unarmed student protestors, killing hundreds if not thousands in what became known as the Tlatelolco Massacre.
“The main theme of the Mexico City games was peace with icons of the dove of peace all over the city,” says Goldblatt. “The Mexican government slaughters hundreds of students and then unleashes a reign of terror and torture and disappearance, all while the games are going on, but the IOC doesn’t blink an eye.”
Likewise, the IOC was initially hesitant to ban Apartheid-era South Africa from the 1960 Olympics, but eventually bowed to the pressure of African nations who said they would boycott the games if whites-only South African teams were allowed to play. South Africa was eventually barred from the Olympics from 1960 until 1992, after the fall of Apartheid.
Even one of the darkest chapters of Olympic history didn’t lead to a cancellation of the games. In 1972, an armed band of Palestinian terrorists attacked the Israeli compound at the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, killing two Israeli athletes and holding another nine hostage. In the ensuing standoff, all nine remaining Israeli athletes were murdered. Instead of calling off the Munich games, Olympic officials continued the competition after a two-day suspension.
The 1996 summer games in Atlanta, Georgia, were also allowed to go on after a homemade bomb exploded during a free concert in Centennial Olympic Park. Two people died in the early-morning blast and more than a hundred were injured, but only a few hours later, the president of Atlanta’s Olympic organizing committee said, "The spirit of the Olympic movement mandates that we continue.
From America’s vantage in 1889, the Russian influenza posed little cause for concern. So what if it had struck with a vengeance in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg that fall, infecting as much as half the population? Or that it had raged swiftly westward across Europe, into the British Isles? Or that some of the continent’s most prominent leaders—the czar of Russia, the king of Belgium, the emperor of Germany—had fallen ill with the virus?
To Americans, it was safely over there, a vast ocean away.
But within a few months, the pandemic spread to virtually every part of the earth. Tracing its path, scientists would observe that it tended to follow the major roads, rivers and, most notably, railway lines—many of which hadn’t existed during last major pandemic in the 1840s.
That finding gave credence to the theory that the disease was spread by human contact, not by the wind or other means—and that as long as people could move with ease from city to city and country to country, stopping its spread would be all but impossible. Today, the Russian influenza is often cited as the first modern flu pandemic.
Most Americans first learned of the pandemic in early December of 1889. The nation’s newspapers covered its growing toll in Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Paris, Prague, Vienna and other cities. When top European leaders fell ill, Americans were updated on their condition on a near-daily basis.
Even so, the news seemed to cause no particular stir in the U.S. and certainly nothing resembling a panic. But just as railroad transportation had allowed the influenza to cross Europe in a matter of weeks, the larger, faster steamships of the day increased the odds that infected travelers would soon be arriving from across the Atlantic.
Indeed, New York and other East Coast port cities became the earliest U.S. locales to report suspected cases, and seven members of one Manhattan family, ranging in age from 14 to 50, were among the first confirmed patients. Their household’s outbreak had begun with sudden chills and headaches, reports said, followed by sore throat, laryngitis and bronchitis. Overall, “the patients were about as sick as persons with a bad cold,” according to one newspaper account.
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Initially, public health officials played down the dangers, arguing that the Russian influenza represented a particularly mild strain. Some officials denied that it had arrived at all and insisted that patients merely had the common cold or a more typical, seasonal flu.
The newspapers, too, treated the influenza as nothing to get worked up about. “It is not deadly, not even necessarily dangerous,” The Evening World in New York announced, “but it will afford a grand opportunity for the dealers to work off their surplus of bandanas.”
On December 28, newspapers reported the first death in the U.S., 25-year-old Thomas Smith of Canton, Massachusetts. He was said to have “ventured out too soon after his illness, caught a fresh cold and died of pneumonia.” Soon after, a prominent Boston banker also succumbed.
As the death toll rose, Americans began to take the threat more seriously. For the first week of January 1890, New York reported a wintertime death record of 1,202 people. While only 19 of those cases were attributed to influenza alone, the numbers revealed a startling spike in deaths from related diseases.
“Persons with weak lungs and those suffering from heart disease or kidney troubles are most seriously affected, and in many cases the influenza leads quickly to pneumonia,” the New-York Tribune reported.
Meanwhile, the disease spread inland, helped, as in Europe, by America’s vast network of railroads. Reports came in from Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Kansas City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other U.S. cities.
One Los Angeles victim gave a particular vivid description of the experience. “I felt as if I had been beaten with clubs for about an hour and then plunged into a bath of ice,” he told a reporter. “My teeth chattered like castanets, and I consider myself lucky now to have gotten off with a whole tongue.”
People coped as best they could. “On a Sixth Avenue Elevated train this morning fully one-half of the passengers were coughing, sneezing, and applying handkerchiefs to noses and eyes, and many of them had their heads bundled up in scarves and mufflers,” The Evening World reported. “They were a dejected and forlorn appearing crowd.”
Druggists throughout the country noted an unusually high demand for quinine, which some health authorities had suggested as a possible remedy—though medical journals warned against the dangers of self-medicating and urged people to simply let the disease run its course.
By early February 1890, according to contemporary accounts, the influenza had largely disappeared in the U.S. Difficult as the pandemic had been, the country had gotten off lucky compared with much of Europe. New York City recorded the highest number of deaths, with 2,503, although Boston, with a smaller population, was harder hit on a per-capita basis. The total U.S. death toll was just under 13,000, according to the U.S. Census Office, out of about 1 million worldwide.
The Russian influenza wasn’t entirely finished, however. It returned several times in subsequent years. Fortunately, a large portion of the U.S. population was immune by then, having been exposed to it during its first visit.
Today, the Russian influenza is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the far more devastating Spanish influenza of 1918. But it did give Americans a preview of life—and death—in an increasingly interconnected world.
“Are YOU doing all you can?” “We can do it!” During World War II, Americans at home were reminded to do their part by splashy propaganda posters that emphasized pulling together for the national good. Industry did its part, too, thanks to wartime laws that prioritized military production. Seemingly overnight, car factories produced warplanes. Lipstick manufacturers made bomb cases instead. Even nylon, the new synthetic fabric that covered women’s legs at the beginning of the war, was recruited to military applications.
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Thanks to the Defense Production Act of 1950, a law with roots in the all-society mobilization of World War II, the United States still has the authority to spur industry in times of national emergency.
The country was anything but ready for a major conflict in 1941. Due to the Great Depression and a national unwillingness to get involved in conflict overseas, the United States had been unprepared. But with the attack on Pearl Harbor in and the United States’ entry into the war, the nation had to come to grips with its unreadiness.
The country’s industrial sector was still reeling from the Depression, and owners weren’t thrilled about the thought of investing in defense production. “Many American producers of primary materials were reluctant to expand facilities, and many manufacturers reluctantly converted assembly lines from peacetime goods to vitally needed armaments,” writes historian Barton J. Bernstein.
To break through that reluctance, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued sweeping war powers. The Second War Powers Act gave him the power to requisition supplies and property and force entire industries to produce wartime products. Instead of producing products for civilians, the nation’s factories became powerhouses pumping out planes, tanks, military vehicles, weapons, ships and other defense-related products. U.S. manufacturing output grew by 300 percent during the war, and despite wartime scarcity, consumer spending increased, too, thanks to higher employment and wages.
The War Powers Acts represented unprecedented presidential power, but most of those powers contracted with the end of World War II. As the Cold War heated up, President Harry Truman and his advisors saw Korea as a pivotal front. When Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, catching the United States unawares, western powers worried that it was the first foray of a larger communist world takeover and braced for military intervention.
Once again, the United States was unprepared for war. Defense production had dropped off and industries were once again catering to civilian needs. Even the kinds of tools that would be needed to produce more military materials were in short supply, and experts agreed the nation was not ready for another war. If Communists attempted to fight their western opponents on another front, too, the United States would be unable to respond.
In July 1950, Truman warned Congress that the seemingly inevitable war in Korea would cause supply shortages and inflation at home and asked them—and the nation—to ramp up defense spending at home.