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

by Jeremy Schaap

  “Owens is a form runner,” wrote Jesse Abramson, the track-and-field correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune. “He is the picture of relaxed ease as he sprints. He never shows any apparent effort. He always appears able to do better.”

  No one doubted that Owens could do better than he had done after leaving California. But he would have to wait several months to prove that his great triumphs in May and June could be replicated. Most of America’s best young track stars left for Europe the day after the meet at Ohio Field. Owens headed the other way, back to Cleveland and his wife and daughter.

  In the space of just a few weeks he had attained international celebrity, broken several world records, reportedly proposed to one woman, married another woman, raced in the Midwest, on the West Coast, again in the Midwest, then on the East Coast, lost three consecutive races to a powerful foe, and watched as his Olympic prospects were downgraded from sure thing to long shot. Jesse Owens was tired.

  4

  Heel Bones and a New Start

  * * *

  CLEVELAND: SUMMER 1935

  AS EULACE PEACOCK was spending July in France and Luxembourg, dining on foie gras and mussels, Jesse Owens was in Cleveland, pumping gas at a Sohio service station at the corner of East 92nd Street and Cedar Avenue. He was also fending off accusations that he had been paid to do nothing by the Ohio state legislature, which had been employing him as a page. His salary was not insignificant for the mid-1930s. During the school year he had been paid three dollars a day, and even when the school year ended, he was compensated for expenses incurred on state business. As Owens’s biographer William J. Baker wrote, “The latter clause was interpreted liberally: Jesse had his expenses paid to and from California [for the recent meets] with a check drawn on the state treasury.”

  What aroused the interest of the Amateur Athletic Union—which had the power to declare Owens a professional, thus banning him from amateur sports events such as the Olympic trials—was Owens’s employment status during the early summer of 1935, when he had been setting all those world records. Even though he had been nowhere near Columbus, he had still received $159 as a page ad interim. A hearing would be held in Cleveland on August 12 to determine his eligibility as an amateur. If he were deemed ineligible, he probably would not make it to Berlin.

  In the meantime, even after Eulace Peacock helped diminish his achievements, the public clamored for more news of Jesse Owens. In the New York Times, it was suggested that Haile Selassie, the beleaguered emperor of Ethiopia, which at the time was one of only three nations controlled by blacks (the others were Haiti and Liberia), was Harlem’s biggest hero—next to Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. Even as Owens worked the Sohio pump, even as he prepared to defend his amateur status, the reason for his greatness was being debated. As black athletes emerged for the first time in large numbers as national figures, the public continued to be fascinated with their physiognomy. Otherwise reasonable people talked knowingly of inherent black advantages, such as supposedly long heel bones and impossibly smooth muscles. To dispel such nonsense, Dr. William Montague Cobb decided to spend some time examining Owens.

  One of America’s foremost black physicians and a future president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Cobb had received his undergraduate degree from Amherst in 1925, his medical degree from Howard in 1929, and his Ph.D. from Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve in 1932. His specialty was anatomy. For the better part of two days, he poked at Owens’s joints, X-rayed his bones, felt his muscles, and, using a set of calipers, measured the length and girth of his legs. Most impressive, Cobb thought, Owens’s calves were each sixteen inches in diameter, and he was photographed stretching a piece of rope around those gargantuan muscles. Finally, Cobb, who had said he wanted to know if outstanding athletic performance was attributable to race, revealed his findings. In a word, he said no, race did not matter.

  The results of Cobb’s examination were reported around the country. Cobb said that “industry, training, incentive, and outstanding courage, rather than physical characteristics, are responsible for the young Negro sprinter’s accomplishments.” He also said that “it is a surmise that a longer heelbone, characteristic of Negroes, gives them greater leverage.” In any event, he added, Jesse Owens did not have an exceptionally long heel.

  The Cobb examination was a pleasant diversion from the stress of the forthcoming AAU hearing, which would take place a week later. Stories about Owens’s status were on the front pages everywhere. Even Charley Paddock weighed in. Eulace Peacock might have been his choice to win at the upcoming Olympics, but in this matter he would defend Owens. A veteran of several skirmishes with the AAU himself, Paddock dismissed the charge of professionalism as “a tempest in a teapot . . . Even if Jesse is an amateur athlete,” Paddock wrote in one of his occasional newspaper columns, “he still has to eat.”

  After meeting on August 12 to discuss the Owens matter, the local AAU chapter took nearly three weeks to announce its decision. Finally, on August 31, James E. Lee, the local AAU secretary, announced, “We failed to find that Owens was paid because of his athletic ability. We have sent an official report to the national executive committee that Owens’s amateur standing is not in doubt.”

  With the Olympics approaching, the national media had been paying close attention to the matter. After the AAU decision, the New York Times declared in a headline, “Case Is Closed.”

  Naturally, Owens was relieved to hear that his Olympic eligibility was intact. The news made his day at the Sohio station—and Snyder’s day back in Columbus.

  Both Owens and Snyder were less relieved to be thrust unwillingly into a national debate about whether American athletes should boycott the Olympics in Germany. A boycott movement had been gaining strength ever since Hitler had come to power in 1933, but it did not intrude on Owens until the summer of 1935. On August 23, the Amsterdam News urged black athletes not to take part in the games. “Humanity demands that Hitlerism be crushed,” an editorialist wrote, “and yours is the opportunity to strike a blow which may hasten the inevitable end.”

  Owens had no desire to be pulled into a political struggle, especially one that might cost him a trip to the Olympics. Working at the state capitol, he had had enough of politics. For the moment, he kept quiet.

  Of more interest to him was the national debate about his relative greatness. Alan Gould, the AP sports editor, gave Peacock top billing in a report on American Olympic prospects one year out from the games. Gould’s colleague Edward J. Neil, however, tried to dispel the notion that Owens was washed up. In fact, the headline in the Los Angeles Times read: “Owens Not Washed Up, Says Ohio State Coach.” Actually, Larry Snyder wasn’t quoted anywhere in Neil’s story. Explaining Owens’s losses to Peacock, Neil wrote, “It is significant that Jesse showed, very plainly, that he was putting out a lot more energy—nervous energy in the form of tension—in losing than he had in his winning races. The pictures show it. He’s tightened up, laboring, as he finishes a foot or so behind Peacock. He was ‘too tired to relax,’ evidently. It would have been better probably if he’d quit a week or so earlier. But he can get rested up next winter.” In summation, Neil couldn’t resist chiding Owens’s multiplying but unnamed detractors. “As for his being permanently burned out,” he wrote, “that’s just a lot of sand in somebody’s picnic potato salad.”

  As always when something was going wrong, Owens went back to the basics, back to the fundamentals that had been set down for him by Charles Riley. But this time the problem lay in the fundamentals. Owens’s start, the start he had always used, wasn’t working. It was finally clear that he must address his greatest weakness. This was a blow to a man who had always run, and won, effortlessly. Unnerved by the knowledge that he could be caught, he enlisted Riley to help him develop a new starting position. This was not a minor development; it was, rather, a story treated as seriously as a presidential policy shift or a major stock market fluctuation. Riley, of course, was eager to help.
He knew that ultimate victory was assured if Owens could improve himself at the gun.

  Together, Owens and Riley spent day after day back at the track at East Tech. In the withering July heat, Riley had Owens crouch for him, then spring to his feet, a thousand times. He watched and watched and watched until the solution became clear to him.

  “Listen, Jesse, this is what we’ll do,” he said. His old-fashioned collar was stained with sweat. “You’re not going to get all the way down anymore. We must modify your set position.”

  With this objective in mind, Riley taught Owens to start from a semicrouch rather than the standard kneeling position in which a sprinter’s fingertips touched the ground. He had Owens angle his torso at ninety degrees from his lower body, plant his left foot about 12 inches in front of his right one, hold his right arm high behind his hip, and crook his left arm in front of him. The new method, Riley told a reporter, was a combination of the standing position used by sprinters before the turn of the century and the contemporary kneeling position. “Jesse can really throw himself at the track now,” Riley said. “He won’t need ten, fifteen yards to dig himself out of a hole.”

  “Tests so far,” the Associated Press reported, “show that using the conventional kneeling start Owens’s first step as he comes up out of the holes is twenty-three inches. Using the new method, his first step is thirty-six inches long.” The papers reported that Riley said the new start enabled Owens to cover as much ground in seven strides as he had previously covered in eight strides. But eventually Owens and Riley abandoned their unorthodox plan and worked simply on improving Owens’s drive from the kneeling position.

  Serenely secure in his position at Ohio State and in Owens’s life, Larry Snyder was not jealous of Riley and never interfered in the older man’s relationship with his protégé. As the leaves began to turn, though, it became clear to Snyder, Owens, Riley, and everyone else that the greatest threat to Owens’s Olympic gold medal prospects was not his inadequate start, nor Eulace Peacock, nor Ralph Metcalfe. It wasn’t the AAU’s ethics committee, either. And it certainly wasn’t any speedy German or Dutchman or Englishman. It was, instead, a colorful Tammany Hall judge by the name of Jeremiah T. Mahoney.

  PART II

  5

  The Judge and the Millionaire

  * * *

  NEW YORK: 1935

  ODDLY ENOUGH, the most vigorous and effective proponent of an American boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Germany was not a Jew. Instead he was a devout Irish-American Catholic known all his life for his stubborn opposition to racial and religious discrimination. Born on Manhattan’s East Side in 1878, Jeremiah Titus Mahoney worked his way through New York University—where he played football, baseball, and lacrosse and high-jumped—and then NYU’s School of Law. In 1923 Governor Alfred E. Smith appointed him to the state supreme court, where he served for six years before returning to private practice. Eventually Mahoney ran for mayor of New York, won the Democratic nomination, and lost the general election to Fiorello La Guardia by nearly 20 percentage points.

  Mahoney’s foil in the Olympic boycott movement, Avery Brundage, was also a self-made man in the Horatio Alger mold. Born in 1887 in Detroit, Brundage was forced to help support his family when his father walked out on them. He sold newspapers on the street. He then worked his way through the University of Illinois, where he put the shot, high-jumped, and speed-walked (in those days, race walkers were called heel-and-toers). He also wrote for The Scribbler, the campus literary magazine. In a piece titled “The Football Field As a Sifter of Men,” Brundage wrote, “No better place than a football field could be chosen to test out a man. Here a fellow is stripped of most of the finer little things contributed by ages of civilization, and his virgin nature is exposed to the hot fire of battle. It is man against man, and there is no more thorough mode of exposing one’s true self.”

  No one could say that Avery Brundage lacked earnestness.

  By the mid-1930s, Brundage was a multimillionaire. Construction and investing had become his games and patience his virtue. “You didn’t have to be a wizard to make a fortune during the Depression,” he said years later. “All you had to do was buy stocks and bonds in depressed corporations for a few cents on the dollar and then wait. I was just lucky.”

  Even Brundage’s detractors—who were legion—found him admirable in some respects. John Lardner called him “the Noblest Badger of them all.” And Red Smith wrote, “He was sincere and honest and inflexible and intransigent, with an integrity equaled only by his insensitivity.” Then again, Smith wrote, “Although Avery was frequently wrong-headed, he could also be arrogant and condescending.”

  In the 1930s, at the same time that Brundage was mastering the markets, Mahoney, who succeeded Brundage as the president of the Amateur Athletic Union, became one of the most powerful men in all of sports. In 1935, after long reflection, he came to the conclusion that American participation in Hitler’s Olympics would serve only to legitimate a wholly evil regime, a regime that was discriminating against its own Jewish citizens as it chose its Olympic teams. “There is no room for discrimination on grounds of race, color, or creed in the Olympics,” Mahoney said. “The A.A.U. voted in 1933 to accept an invitation to compete at Berlin in 1936, provided Germany pledged that there would be no discrimination against Jewish athletes. If that pledge is not kept, I personally do not see why we should compete.”

  Despite Brundage’s assurances to the contrary, anyone could see that the Third Reich had no real intention of allowing Jewish athletes to compete fully on its Olympic teams. Almost since the day the Nazis had come to power, it had been clear that they planned to discriminate against Jewish athletes, despite their assurances to the contrary. Those assurances had first been offered in Vienna in June 1933, at a meeting of the International Olympic Committee. The committee had convened in part to decide whether Germany would still be allowed to host the 1936 Olympics. If the Germans refused to promise to treat Jewish athletes fairly, the committee would move the games. Initially the Germans offered merely to abide by all the laws regulating the Olympic games. “The German Olympic Committee had arrived with this promise from their government in their pockets,” John MacCormac reported for the New York Times from Vienna. But when several American members of the IOC demanded a specific assurance that Jews would not be excluded from the German Olympic team, the German legation had to cable superiors in Berlin for instructions. Finally the Germans agreed to the broader guidelines. “What has happened is another proof of the spirit of fellowship that sport engenders,” said His Excellency Dr. Theodor Lewald, the chairman of the German Olympic committee. MacCormac was duly impressed. “This development represents a complete backing down by the Hitler government,” he wrote. “The straightforward character of the promise obtained from the German Government came as all the greater surprise, and the opinion was expressed that a real blow had been struck in the cause of racial freedom, at least in the realm of sport.”

  Of course no such blow had been struck. The Nazis, typically, simply made a promise they had no intention of keeping. Still, the IOC went to the trouble of entrusting the task of enforcing the agreed-upon regulations to Lewald and the other members of the German Olympic committee: the duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Dr. Karl Ritter von Halt, Professor Carl Diem, Dr. Heinrich Sahm, and Hans von Tschammer und Osten. The Viennese reporters covering the story were skeptical. They thought, quite rightly, that “nothing but formal and empty assurances on the question of Jewish participation in the Olympics could be expected from the committee, which, it was remarked, consisted of ‘diplomats rather than sportsmen.’” The Austrian press already knew how much stock to put in Nazi promises.

  Just a few days after the convention in Vienna, at a Nazi party meeting in Berlin, Von Tschammer und Osten, the German minister of sport, made it clear that the Austrians were right. He told his fellow Nazis, on the record, that the pledges made in Vienna would not hinder the national agenda. “We shall see to it that both in our
national life and in our relations and competitions with foreign nations only such Germans shall be allowed to represent the nation as those against whom no objection can be raised,” he said. Everyone in the room knew which people were to be objected to.

  Von Tschammer und Osten said virtually the same thing at another meeting, in Cologne. He wanted his fellow Nazis to know exactly where he and the German Olympic officials stood, despite Lewald’s public statements. To clarify the German position for its readers, the Associated Press asked him to answer several questions. Responding to a question about a German decision to deny Jewish sports clubs “all special facilities,” Von Tschammer und Osten wrote,

  It is hardly fair to expect that state support be given to purely Jewish organizations, which, being composed almost exclusively of Zionists, are even today in sharp political conflict with the government. Just as Nationalist sports organizations during the past years continued to enlist and engage in activities without any material assistance by relying purely upon themselves, so, too, no other treatment can now justly be meted out to Jewish organizations. That certainly won’t create any difficulty for them, for in their circles substantial private means are available.

  For three years the Germans engaged in similar rhetorical games with the international press and diplomatic corps. No, they said, we would never discriminate against the Jews. They have every right to take part in our Olympic trials. But of course, like everyone else, Jewish athletes must be sponsored by local clubs. And of course we cannot compel the local clubs to have them as members. These clubs have rights, too. And they must also abide by our laws. Which bar Jews from non-Jewish clubs. What about Jewish clubs? They are all either Zionist or Communist fronts. You cannot possibly expect them to be allowed to send athletes to our trials. And so on.