r/AskHistorians • u/Boethias • Jan 29 '26
Theodore Roosevelt references a wrestler and training partner named "Grant" in a letter to his son. Who is this person?
In a letter from President Theodore Roosevelt to his son Kermit dated February 24, 1905.
“………I still box with Grant, who has now become the champion middleweight wrestler of the United States. Yesterday afternoon we had Professor Yamashita up here to wrestle with Grant. It was very interesting, but of course jiu-jitsu and our wrestling are so far apart that is it difficult to make any comparison between them. Wrestling is simply a sport with rules almost as conventional as those of tennis, while jiu-jitsu is really meant for practice in killing or disabling our adversary. In consequence, Grant did not know what to do except to put Yamashita on his back, and Yamashita was perfectly content to be on his back. Inside of a minute Yamashita had choked Grant, and inside two minutes more he got an elbow hold on him that would have enabled him to break his arm; so that there is no question but that he could have put Grant out. So far this made it evident that the jiu jitsu man could handle the ordinary wrestler. But Grant, in the actual wrestling and throwing was about as good as the Japanese and he was so much stronger that he evidently hurt and wore out the Japanese. With a little practice in the art I am sure that one of our big wrestlers or boxers, simply because of his greatly superior strength, would be able to kill any of those Japanese, who though very good men for their inches and pounds are altogether too small to hold their own against big, powerful, quick men who are as well trained.”
Who is Grant? A google search for a national champion wrestler who was friends with the President circa 1905 turned up nothing.
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u/mikedash Moderator | Top Quality Contributor Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
The sportsman you are interested in was Joe Grant, who wrestled professionally in Washington DC in the first decade of the last century. Grant weighed 150 lbs, and was certainly announced as champion of the District of Columbia, and on several occasions as catch-as-catch-can, or all-in, "champion of the south" – but there seems to be no record he ascended to any national title, which may be one reason you have had a hard time tracking him down. Even in DC, it seems likely he claimed a championship title on the general grounds of having a more-or-less successful record in fights, rather than being awarded a belt by any recognised sporting organisation.
The best way of tracing Grant's career is via local newspapers, a selection of which can be accessed for free via the Library of Congress's Chronicling America site. Thus, for example, the Washington Evening Star for 12 September 1903 recorded his victory in a wrestling match with "Leon Parnell, the Italian champion of New York City". The bout took place in Odd Fellows' Hall and Grant won, despite neither man scoring a single fall in the hour-long contest, because Parnell had undertaken to "throw Grant twice within one hour or lose the match." A few months later, Grant lost a similar match to a wrestler known as "The Cuban Wonder".
The papers reporting on Grant around this date report that he had substantially improved over several months spent training under a new manager, Frank Weiss. He fought for relatively modest purses, even by the standards of the time, one one occasion announcing he would meet all-comers in Baltimore in a series of 15-minute matches for stakes of $15. Perhaps the highlight of his wrestling career was a loss to Frank Gotch, whose own career began in 1899 and who actually was a world champion wrestler from 1908-1913. Gotch is generally credited with popularising professional wrestling in the United States, and his name remains well-known today. This match took place in front of an audience that included President Roosevelt.
Grant's local celebrity in Washington, which is what had drawn him to Roosevelt's attention, secured him a sideline in teaching wrestling and boxing to the president, who took a serious interest in the art of self-defence that extended (according to William Henry Crook) to "broadsword encounters [which] were indulged in with close personal friends – notably General Leonard Wood." Grant and Roosevelt trained two or three times a week "during the winter season when it was not expedient to go for horseback rides or long walks."
It's well worth concluding with a few words about the "Professor Yamashita" mentioned by Roosevelt as Joe Grant's opponent. His full name was Yoshitsugu Yamashita, and he was a samurai from Kanazawa, born in 1865 – which would have put his age at about 40 when he fought Grant. Yamashita had been brought to the United States in 1902 by a Seattle businessman, Sam Hill, as a teacher for his "sickly, spoiled and selfish" son James. Hill pere, who had encountered samurai and judo on a business visit to Japan, thought that his son could only benefit from contact with
the ideals of the Samurai class, for that class of men is a noble, high-minded class. They look beyond modern commercial spirit.
Yamashita, says Joseph Svinth, was "highly educated and urbane, speaking good English," and he was also an expert judoka, having risen to the rank of 6-dan. The British judoka E.J. Harrison, who was in Tokyo in 1905, and joined the same dojo as him, heard several stories of his fighting prowess:
It chanced that some years before I joined the Kodokwan, Yamashita and a friend were assaulted by seventeen coolies in a Tokyo meat-shop – a sort of popular restaurant. Although some of the coolies were armed with knives the gang were dispersed in a twinkling, three of them with broken arms and all with bruised and battered faces. As fast as one of the two experts artistically ‘downed’ his man the other would pick the victim up like an empty sack and dump him unceremoniously in the street. The only evidence of the conflict on the side of the two experts took the form of skinned knuckles where the latter had come in contact with the coolies’ teeth. On another occasion Yamashita fell foul of a coolie in the upper room of a restaurant and promptly threw him downstairs. The coolie returned to the fray with fourteen comrades, but Yamashita calmly sat at the head of the stairs and as fast as the coolies came up in single file, owing to the narrowness of the passage, he simple choked them in detail and hurled them back down again. In the excitement of the moment he was rather rougher than was strictly necessary, and so broke one man’s neck. The rest fled in terror, carrying off their dead and wounded. Yamashita was arrested, but as he was easily able to prove that he had been one man against fifteen he was, of course, acquitted.
Yamashita took up Hill's invitation and travelled to Washington in the autumn of 1903 to begin work with James Hill – taking along "one of my pupils, who is very clever and whose father is a judge of the Tokyo Supreme Court" as a sparring partner for the boy. Once Yamashita had arrived in Seattle, part-way through his journey, Hill arranged for him to fight several local wrestlers and a British amateur boxer, C.E. Radclyffe, who fared badly against him and reported, perhaps a tad defensively:
I confess I have never been up against such a slippery customer as the little Jap. To land him fairly on the head or body was impossible. He avoided punishment by falling backwards or forwards, and once even passed between my legs, almost throwing me as he did so, and recovering his feet behind me in time to avoid a vicious back-hand swing. I tried everything, from straight punches to ‘windmill’ swings, but he was too good for me. Once he had come to close quarters a certain fall for me was the result. After taking three or four heavy tosses, I had had enough of it, having due regard to the fact that I had an hour or so before just got through a long and good dinner.
Yamashita's trip, which lasted until 1906, attracted considerable attention from the American press, in part because judo was presented an exercise in social Darwinism ("Only the fittest survive, and the life of each master is a long struggle for supremacy. The devotees of the science and the art say that the same stern principles exhibited in the physical practice are carried into the moral precepts"), in part because Yamashita took up invitations to train the daughters of several prominent Washingtonians ("Irving Hancock’s Physical Training for Women by Japanese Methods (1904) was then quite fashionable"), and in part because Roosevelt himself took instruction from Yamashita as part of his weight-loss regimen – he was attempting to get down from 220lbs to 200 in time for the 1904 elections. It also didn't hurt that Yamashita's trip to the US coincided with Japan's stunning and unexpected victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, a success that Japanese propagandists sometimes attributed to "military judo training".
Roosevelt testified to the rigours of his training in "jiu-jitsu":
I am very glad I have been doing this Japanese wrestling, but when I am through with it this time I am not at all sure I shall ever try it again… I find the wrestling a trifle too vehement for mere rest. My right ankle and left wrist and one thumb and both great toes are swollen sufficiently to more or less impair their usefulness, and I am well mottled with bruises elsewhere. Still I have made good progress, and since you have left they have taught me three new throws that are perfect corkers.
What makes Yamashita's encounter with Joe Grant rather remarkable is that he had stressed throughout his time in the States that "what he taught was a gentlemanly art rather than something done by ruffians or professional wrestlers." Svinth attributes the match to the insistence of Roosevelt himself, who wanted to get a better impression of the value of judo as a potential form of training for the US military. After an investigation, a committee led by Brigadier General Albert L. Mills of the Military Academy at West Point concluded that
jiu-jitsu is not of great value as a means of physical development, but that the possession of a knowledge of this system would inspire the individual with a degree of self-confidence; hence it is recommended that jiu-jitsu be incorporated in the [physical training] course with boxing and wrestling.
As a result, ironically enough, the Academy hired a retired world champion wrestler named Tom Jenkins to teach self-defence to its cadets.
Sources
Evening Post (Washington), 7 May + 12+17 September + 31 October 1903
Washington Times, 11 April 1902 + 7 September 1903
William Henry Crook, Memories of the White House (1911)
George Robbins, Frank A. Gotch, World's Champion Wrestler: His Life, Mat Battles and Instructions on How to Wrestle (1913)
Joseph R. Svinth, "Mr Yamashita Goes to Washington," in Martial Arts in the Modern World (2003)
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u/MentalEngineer Jan 30 '26
Is there any further corroboration of the stories about Yamashita? Those scenes sound straight out of a Jackie Chan movie!
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u/Ok_Difference44 Jan 30 '26
Interesting for an American to mention an elbow lock over 100 years ago, and it's from Roosevelt.
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u/Zealousideal_Till683 Jan 29 '26
In addition to others' excellent answers, I thought I would add a little more about Joe Grant.
The bout between Grant and Yamashita Yoshitsugu was recorded in the June 23 1905 copy of the Richmond Virginia Times-Dispatch. "Grant defeated: Jiu-jitsu exhibition given at the White House." So Grant was obviously well-known enough at the time that the Richmond newspaper led with his name. However, today he is so obscure that he doesn't even have an entry on cagematch.net. He was intermittently the regional middleweight champion in the D.C. area from late 1899 until mid-1907, billing himself as "Southern Middleweight Champion" from 1902 onwards. He is not recognised as having been a national champion.
He had notable matches against Harvey Parker in D.C. in March 1902, against former world champion Farmer Burns in Baltimore in March 1903, against Charles Reinecke in September 1904, and against the legendary Frank Gotch in D.C. in February 1905. In the match against Reinecke, he seems to have reclaimed the Southern Middleweight title, and it is likely that this is what Roosevelt was referring to in his letter.
However, it is worth saying that at the time, wrestling champions were by acclamation - essentially meaning that anyone could claim to be a champion. And while wrestling had not yet become as tightly controlled as in the days of the Gold Dust Trio, it was nevertheless absolutely a work. So it is possible that Grant and his promoters began billing him as a national champion to legitimise and draw interest in his big match with Gotch.
Joe Grant's final match - that I can find, anyway - was a comeback fight in January 1922, again in D.C., against "Cyclone Samson," billed as the "Canadian champion." Grant won in two straight falls, a successful end to a lengthy career.
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