Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics

by Jeremy Schaap

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART I

  A Day to Remember

  Out of Alabama

  Vincible

  Heel Bones and a New Start

  PART II

  The Judge and the Millionaire

  “We Are with You, Adolf”

  A Blessing in Disguise

  Jew Kills Nazi

  A Friend and a Foe Felled

  Olympic Trials

  PART III

  Olympia

  The Belle of the Ball

  The Battle Tent of Some Great Emperor

  The Youth of the World

  Day One

  Day Two

  Day Three

  “He Flies Like the Hindenburg”: Day Four

  The Relay

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2007 by Jeremy Schaap

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Schaap, Jeremy.

  Triumph : the untold story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics /Jeremy Schaap.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-68822-7

  ISBN-10: 0-618-68822-6

  1. Owens, Jesse, 1913–1980 2. Track and field athletes—United States—Biography. 3. African American athletes—Biography. 4. Jewish athletes—United States—Biography. 5. Glickman, Marty, 1917–2001. 6. Stoller, Sam 1915–1983. 7. Olympics—Participation, American. 8. Olympic Games (11th : 1936: Berlin, Germany) 9. National socialism—Philosophy. 10. Racism—Germany—History—20th century. I. Title.

  GV697.09S33 2007

  796.42092—dc22 [B] 2006026926

  eISBN 978-0-547-52726-0

  v2.0616

  Text from LENI RIEFENSTAHL: A MEMOIR © 1993 by Leni Riefenstahl. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

  For Lester Gottlieb, a consummate grandfather and gentleman

  He had great power in his legs . . . he had blinding speed . . . and his style was flawless—with no sign of extra effort. Jesse was as smooth as the west wind.

  —GRANTLAND RICE

  Prologue

  JUST BEFORE 9:30 P.M. central time on September 23, 1955, in a handsome townhouse on Chicago’s South Side, James Cleveland Owens slipped into a tweed jacket and sat down in a straight-backed chair. As he smoothed out his pencil mustache and slicked back his hair—what little was left of it—a dozen technicians put the finishing touches on what had been an allday job, wiring and lighting the Owens home. In a few minutes, Owens would be talking live on national television with Edward R. Murrow of CBS, on his celebrity interview show Person to Person. More than 20 million Americans would watch as Murrow spoke from a studio in New York via satellite, first with Owens and his family, and then, in the second half of the show, with Leonard Bernstein and his.

  A forty-two-year-old father of three, Jesse Owens weighed twenty-five pounds more than he had in Berlin in 1936, when he had turned in the most indelible performance ever at the Olympic games. In his conservative jacket, flannel slacks, white shirt, and dark tie, he could have passed for a fifty-year-old. Not that he wasn’t in superb shape. He was. In fact, just a few months earlier he had run 100 yards in 9.9 seconds, less than a second slower than his personal best. He still held the world record in both the broad jump (now called the long jump) and the 4 × 100-meter relay—though both records had been set in the mid-1930s.

  For his part, Murrow was readying himself for another half-hour of banalities. No one confused Person to Person with See It Now, Murrow’s other show on CBS, the one on which eighteen months earlier he had neutered Senator Joseph McCarthy. Despite the fluff, Murrow was eager to speak with Owens, whose legend had grown significantly since 1936. Here, Murrow thought, was a legitimate American hero, the man who had humbled the Third Reich.

  For Owens, the appearance with Murrow was emblematic of his enhanced stature. In the first fifteen years after his athletic career ended, he had struggled to find his way, professionally and financially. He made more money than the vast majority of his fellow Americans—in the dry-cleaning business, at Ford Motors, working for the state of Illinois—but the windfall he expected in the aftermath of his Olympic heroics never materialized. Banned from amateur competition after an imbroglio with American track officials, he had raced against horses—most famously in Havana, in December 1936, defeating Julio McCaw, a five-year-old bay gelding, after the horse spotted him a 40-yard advantage. In 1938, on the occasion of the first night baseball game at Ebbets Field, he raced two speedy major-league outfielders, spotting them several yards. He barnstormed with a black baseball team and campaigned for the Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon. In countless ways, he sold himself—but he never had much to show for it. Until now.

  By the time Owens sat down to speak with Murrow, he was well on his way to becoming an institution—the Jesse Owens who would spend the rest of his life telling his story to appreciative audiences around the world, the Jesse Owens who could have been a hero from Horatio Alger, if Alger’s heroes had not all been white. In the years after his Olympic victories, his achievements in Berlin had been overshadowed by World War II. But by 1955, at the end of the first decade of the cold war, he was finally getting his due. He was in demand as a banquet speaker and making good money because he had become useful—to industry and government—as a symbol of the opportunities America promised and sometimes delivered. To the delight of white America and most of black America, he disputed the sentiments of Paul Robeson, the All-American football player turned actor/ singer, who famously suggested that African-Americans would not and should not fight for the United States in the event of war with the Soviet Union. Owens, in contrast, held himself out as an example of what black Americans could achieve, despite the indignities and slights he had suffered his entire life. He agreed with Jackie Robinson, who in his 1949 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee had said that blacks had too much invested in the American experiment to support its enemies.

  Just a few days after his appearance on Person to Person, Owens was to embark, at the behest of the State Department, on a goodwill tour of Singapore, Malaya, the Philippines, and India. As A. M. Rosenthal, then the New York Times correspondent in South Asia, put it, Owens’s mission was “to make friends for the United States.” Having fought the fascists with his fleetness of foot, he would now fight the Communists with his charm and rhetoric—even though some Indian writers, unversed in the annals of the Olympics, confused him with Sir Owen Dixon, an Australian judge and United Nations mediator.

  Before the long ride to the subcontinent, though, there was the interview with Murrow, whose fondness for bespoke tailoring matched his own. Finally, at 9:30, with a cigarette clenched in his left hand, Murrow began the interview.

  “Jesse Owens,” he said, “is generally recognized as the greatest track star of the last half-century. His performance in Berlin stands unmatched in modern times. Statistics will never indicate Adolf Hitler’s reaction as he watc
hed a twenty-three-year-old boy from Danville, Alabama, run the athletes of the master race right into the ground.” Owens, whose politeness was among his defining characteristics, declined to correct Murrow by pointing out that he had been twenty-two, not twenty-three, and was from Oakville, Alabama, not Danville. He simply smiled and waited for the questions he knew were coming, the questions that always came.

  After several minutes of amiable chatter—“You look to be in almost good enough condition to get out your old track shoes again”—and the introduction of Owens’s wife and three pretty daughters, Murrow offered him the opportunity to talk about the games of the Eleventh Olympiad. “Jesse Owens,” he said, “what’s your warmest memory of that August of 1936?”

  Owens had been asked this question, or its variants, perhaps hundreds of times. He did not hesitate. “I remember a boy,” he said, his accent betraying no hint of his southern roots, “that I competed against in the broad jump—a boy with whom I built a friendship—and we corresponded for a number of years, and then the war broke out, and I didn’t hear any more from him at all.”

  Owens looked down and away from the camera. The boy he was referring to was Luz Long, the silver medalist, a pure-blooded Aryan from Leipzig who had helped him reach the broad-jump finals when he had been on the verge of disqualifying. Composing himself, Owens talked about Long’s son Kai—Owens and Kai had met in 1951—and then about winning the 100-meter dash. But he had not yet answered Murrow’s question.

  “I think that the greatest moment that a person can have is to stand on a victory stand,” he said, “far away from home, and then, from the distance you can hear the strains of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and then suddenly you make a left turn and you see the Stars and Stripes rising higher and higher, and the higher the Stars and Stripes rose the louder the strains of the Star-Spangled Banner would be heard. I think that’s the greatest moment of my whole athletic career.”

  Finished, he smiled, looking slightly off-camera.

  “Thank you very much, Jesse Owens,” Murrow said, taking a deep drag. “In just a moment, we’ll take you for a visit with Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre.”

  Now Owens rose from his chair and dug into his pants pockets. Unlike Murrow, he had not dared to smoke on camera. Acutely conscious of his image, it simply would not do for Jesse Owens, the great track champion, to be seen smoking on network television. Nor did he want any of the young people who idolized him to think that he condoned the use of tobacco. But now that the technicians were coiling their cables and packing their cases, he pulled out a cigarette, lit up, and inhaled. Eventually, this habit would kill him—as it killed Murrow. But he was hooked, of course, and he would just as soon have joined the Communist Party as quit his Camels.

  As the crew finally moved his couch and coffee table back where they belonged—into the deep indentations in the carpet—Owens and his wife, Ruth, carefully returned his memorabilia to a display case. A few special items had been freed from the case temporarily, for Murrow and his audience to see clearly. There were the bronzed spikes. And the medals. The laurel wreaths. All the tokens of his youthful greatness. He had collected them nineteen years earlier, in Germany, with the eyes of the world fixed on him, in an atmosphere charged by an ascendant Third Reich, on a continent that would soon convulse in war and genocide.

  Nothing Jesse Owens did at the Olympic stadium diminished the horrors to come. He saved no lives. However, for those paying close enough attention, Owens, in Berlin, revealed essential truths. While the western democracies were perfecting the art of appeasement, while much of the rest of the world kowtowed to the Nazis, Owens stood up to them at their own Olympics, refuting their venomous theories with his awesome deeds.

  PART I

  1

  A Day to Remember

  * * *

  ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN: MAY 25, 1935

  LARRY SNYDER, Ohio State’s thirty-eight-year-old track-and-field coach, was worried, running his fingers through his thick blond hair, nervously picking at his face, wondering what could be done to salvage the day, worried more about the health of the best athlete on his team, the best he had ever seen. Jesse Owens was supposed to be warming up for the 100-yard final of the Big Ten championship meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Instead, he was moaning in pain.

  “Jesse,” Snyder said, “look, it’s not worth it. If you can’t go, you can’t go.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Owens responded. He tried to smile, to assure Snyder that everything would be fine. But the throbbing in his lower back made it impossible to smile. “It’s feeling loose. It’s okay,” he lied.

  Snyder shook his head. He knew Owens well enough to know that he was lying. By this time, in fact, Snyder and Owens were usually able to communicate without speech. In the sixteen months they had known each other, they had become more than tutor and pupil. They had become friends and allies. Theirs was a relationship, too, that seemed less father-and-son and more older brother-and-younger brother.

  “No, Jesse, it’s not okay,” Snyder said. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Coach, I’m okay. Let me try.”

  “Fine,” Snyder said. “Well, you better get out there.”

  Unable to lift his shirt over his head, Owens said, “Dave, help me put this on.”

  David Albritton, Ohio State’s gifted high jumper and one of Owens’s closest friends—a high school teammate in Cleveland—walked over, pulled Owens’s shirt down over his head, and shook his head. The night before he had helped Owens climb into a hot bath, where he had soaked for ninety minutes. After a week of baths and rubdowns, Albritton had urged him to rest—not to risk further injury. But Owens insisted that he would compete.

  A twenty-one-year-old sophomore, already a father, Owens hobbled onto the track at Ferry Field at the University of Michigan. As usual, an enormous crowd had gathered to see him run and jump. In the mid-1930s, track and field was still a sport of the masses—the top runners and jumpers and throwers were on the same plane as the biggest stars from baseball, football, and boxing. In fact, in 1950, when the Associated Press polled 393 sports writers to determine the greatest athletes of the first half of the twentieth century, track stars led the way. Six finished among the top eighteen—more than from any other sport. On this day, more than 5000 fans were waiting to watch the phenomenon that was Jesse Owens, expecting or at least hoping to see him break some of the world records he had already tied or that already belonged solely to him. For five days it had been raining. But now, on the campus, it was sunny and warm, ideal sprinting weather. A perfect day, too, to come out to see the athlete who was already being called America’s great hope for the Olympics the following year in Berlin.

  But for Owens, each step was a test, to see if his back could hold his weight. So stupid, he thought, so stupid. Five days earlier, five days before the biggest meet of the season, he had fallen down a flight of stairs while horsing around with his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brothers in Columbus. The injury was all the more upsetting to Owens because it had seemed that he was getting stronger every week. He was coming off a remarkable meet at Northwestern, where he had set a world record in the 220-yard dash and tied the world record in the 100-yard dash. Still, in the back of his mind, he remembered what his first coach, Charles Riley, had always told him about injuries—that they can establish focus, if they are not entirely debilitating.

  Usually Owens warmed up by jogging a quarter mile and stretching. But now he couldn’t do either, even though Mel Walker, another Ohio State high jumper, had spent an hour rubbing him down the night before, after the bath. Snyder finally had had enough. He walked over to Owens and put his hands on his shoulders. “Jesse,” he said, his eyes searching for some way to gauge Owens’s discomfort, “I’m pulling you out of the meet. You can’t run.”

  Without meeting Snyder’s gaze, Owens started to protest. “Coach, I wouldn’t lie to you. I’ll be okay.”

  “I know,” Snyder said, “it’s a big me
et, a big day. I know. But it’s not worth risking all the other days. You can’t run.”

  “Coach, can’t we just wait and see how the first race goes?” Now Owens was begging.

  Snyder removed his hands from Owens’s shoulders. He shook his head. “Fine, you win,” he said. He agreed to allow Owens to run the first race.

  The day before, Owens had qualified for the final of the 100-yard sprint despite the searing pain in his back. Now all he wanted was a chance to compete in the final. If he couldn’t withstand the pain, he wouldn’t participate in the three other events he had entered: the 220-yard dash, the 220-yard low hurdles, and the broad jump.

  Stiff and angry at himself, he walked to the starting line. Even in his compromised state, he stood out from his competition. The numbers were average: five foot ten, 160 pounds. But the physique was extraordinary. The sportswriters of the time, white and black, often likened him to a big cat or, alternately, to a thoroughbred. His legs were perfectly tapered, his chest barreled and lean, his features sharp. Men as well as women routinely used one word to describe him: beautiful. He was called the Buckeye Bullet for alliterative and aesthetic reasons. And when in motion, he was a sight to see.

  As he was limbering up, Owens spotted Riley, the short, frail-looking Irishman who had introduced him to running and jumping in junior high school. Riley had driven all the way from Cleveland, nearly 200 miles, in his ancient Model T to see him compete. If there was one person Owens hated to disappoint, it was Riley—the man he had always considered a second father, the first white man he had met who seemed to be colorblind. When food had been scarce at the Owenses’ dinner table, there had always been room for Jesse at Charles Riley’s. When Jesse’s parents could not afford to buy him running shoes, Riley had dug deep into his meager savings to do so.