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

by Jeremy Schaap

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  In fact, as the AAU vote neared, the case against participation was being made on all fronts. As one of three American members of the International Olympic Committee—along with Brigadier General Sherrill and Colonel William May Garland—Ernest Lee Jahncke wielded considerable influence. Both Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, the Belgian head of the IOC, and Dr. Lewald of the German organizing committee asked Jahncke to use “his good offices in behalf of American participation.” A former assistant secretary of the navy of German extraction, Jahncke balked. On November 26, in New York, he announced that he could not in good conscience support American participation. He made public the impassioned letters he had written to De Baillet-Latour and Lewald.

  To the Belgian, he wrote:

  The fact is that Jewish athletes, as a group, have been denied adequate opportunity for training and competition. Indeed, the Nazi sports authorities have themselves admitted that to be so. And The Associated Press, an impartial news service, has reported: ‘In only a few German cities may Jews use public athletic fields. To build and maintain their own grounds is almost impossible because of the cost. Consequently, many Jewish sportsmen have been forced to play in the country fields and pastures where no facilities are available for many contests such as track events . . .’ You quote an argument used by propagandists for holding the games in Nazi Germany—the fact that Negroes are excluded from many private clubs in America, as if what some Americans do in their own private social relations, however unfortunate it may be, were at all comparable to the treatment of the German Jews by the Nazi government and party. There is still time to arrange for holding the games elsewhere than in Germany. Let me beseech you to seize your opportunity to take your rightful place in the Olympics alongside of de Coubertin instead of Hitler.

  But De Baillet-Latour chose Hitler. “The boycott campaign does not emanate from national Olympic committees and is not approved by any of our colleagues,” he wrote in a letter to the American Olympic Committee. “It is political, based upon groundless statements, whose falseness was easy for me to unmask.”

  To combat such intransigence, Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney was fond of quoting from a pamphlet published in 1934 by a Nazi party functionary named Bruno Malitz. In the pamphlet, titled “Sport in the National Socialist Ideology,” Malitz wrote, “It is logical to expel the Jew from German sports activities. There is no such thing as a Jewish German. Moreover, we do not wish to have Negroes traveling in Germany and meeting our fine sportsmen in competition.” Malitz added that “Frenchmen, Belgians, Polaks and Jews once ran on German tracks and swam in German pools. But it cannot be said that international relations between Germany and its enemies were bettered. The true spirit of German sports was destroyed. Only traitors say otherwise.”

  Malitz’s diatribe was also cited by Alfred J. Lill, a member of the American Olympic Committee, on the evening of December 3 at an impressive boycott rally organized by the Fair Play Committee and attended by 2500 people at the Mecca Temple on West 55th Street in Manhattan (a site sacred to Shriners, not Muslims). Lill—who later defended Charles Lindbergh and assumed an isolationist position himself—was a featured speaker, as were Mayor La Guardia and Governor George H. Earle of Pennsylvania. “Have no doubt of it,” Earle said, “the Nazis will take advantage of the occasion to sell their new philosophy to everyone who attends [the Olympics].”

  Earle knew the Nazis well. As Franklin Roosevelt’s first ambassador to Austria, he had seen firsthand the frightening power of Hitlerism and knew the Third Reich well enough to know that none of its pronouncements could be trusted. “If you want your children to be taught that might is right,” he bellowed from the lectern, “that woman is a lower animal than man, that free press, free speech, and religious freedom are false ideals, that peace is weakness, that liberty as we have learned to love it in America is a myth—if you want these doctrines inculcated in the youth of America, then send your boys and girls to Germany!”

  Eight other governors expressed their support of the boycott in letters read at the rally. So did seven U.S. senators. By voice vote, a resolution was passed urging the Amateur Athletic Union to boycott Berlin. The resolution charged the Nazis with “the regimentation of all sport activity, with seizing control of the preparations for the Olympic Games, and with the duplication in the realm of sport of those basic Nazi policies of regimentation and oppression which have aroused the condemnation of the civilized world.”

  When Jeremiah T. Mahoney spoke, he promised that he would not compromise on the issue and that at the upcoming convention where the vote would take place, he would “ask for no quarter and give none.” He was engulfed in applause.

  Then it was La Guardia’s turn to speak. Rising from his chair—he was seated next to Irving Jaffee, the great Olympic speedskating champion—the mayor approached the lectern. Short and squat, he cut an entirely different figure from the athletic Mahoney. He was also the son of a Jewish mother. “I came here,” La Guardia said, clearing his throat, “because I want to enlist and take an active part in opposing American participation in the games if they are held in Berlin.” He paused. Applause filled the silence.

  It is most important that the games are scheduled to be held under the auspices of the Nazi government—the temporary government of the German people. One of the finest things for world peace has been the Olympic Games held every four years in a different country. Athletic contests imply good sportsmanship and fair play, two qualities which are unknown to the Hitler regime. It is evident that these games are to be exploited by the present regime. Our athletes, I hope, will refuse to lend respectability to Hitler and his followers. The American people, it would seem, are not in favor of sending their athletes to the meeting in Berlin.

  Rather less convincingly, La Guardia further said that “if we could ascertain the viewpoints of the athletes themselves, they would be overwhelmingly against participation.”

  La Guardia underestimated the single-mindedness and selfishness required of world-class athletes. But his mischaracterization of the athletes’ viewpoint was perhaps the only false note struck all night. The assertion that the Nazis would use the games to legitimize their regime was entirely correct. Brundage might even have agreed. It is likely that he hoped the games would, indeed, legitimize the Third Reich, for which he had developed an undeniable fondness.

  Walter White, the secretary of the NAACP, also spoke at the rally. More than ever, White was convinced that American blacks could not in good conscience compete in Berlin. He expressed his sentiments to the audience that night and in a telegram to Mahoney:

  Will you convey to the Amateur Athletic Union the very sincere request of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that it vote decisively against American participation in the 1936 Olympics games if they are held in Germany? This is asked in no spirit of racial selfishness nor in any holier-than-thou attitude.

  The United States has much to answer for in the matter of racial discrimination, especially against Negro athletes in the South. Instead, we ask the AAU to vote against participation on the ground that Germany has violated her pledges against racial discrimination, and for American athletes to participate would be to negate every principle upon which the Olympic games are based.

  Refusal to participate will, we believe, do untold good in helping Germany and the world to realize that racial bigotry must be opposed in its every manifestation. To participate would be to place approval upon the German Government’s deplorable persecution of racial and religious groups and would stultify the Amateur Athletic Union and all athletes who participate.

  The rally at the Mecca Temple was a success in terms of the turnout and the passion of the oratory. But what impact it would have on the AAU’s delegates was unknown. Meanwhile, the nation’s best athletes had decided to do what it was clear they would always do. Despite the pressure from the NAACP, they anno
unced that they wanted to run. The morning after the rally, papers around the country reported that most of America’s most prominent black Olympic hopefuls had sent a letter to Avery Brundage supporting American Olympic participation. While self-interest was the overriding principle, their statement also reflected their dissatisfaction with the situation of blacks in the United States. The letter was signed by Jesse Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, Eulace Peacock, Ben Johnson, and Cornelius Johnson—together, five men who might have defeated any track team ever assembled. Metcalfe spoke for all of them when he said, “No political situation should alter plans for the coming games in Berlin.”

  As Brundage had said the previous day, “These colored athletes do not fear in Germany the racial discrimination they encounter in our own southern states.” Brundage had made a habit of dissembling on the issue of Germany’s Olympics, but in this case he was telling the truth.

  On December 6, just three days before the AAU was to decide whether it would support American participation in the German Olympics, the German steamship Bremen docked in New York. Among those disembarking was a dark-haired, thickly built six-footer wrapped in a double-breasted herringbone overcoat. He was Max Schmeling, the thirty-year-old former heavyweight champion of the world. Schmeling had returned to the United States from his homeland to secure his next opponent—either Jim Braddock, the reigning heavyweight champion, or Joe Louis, the undefeated heavyweight prodigy—and to carry a message to Avery Brundage.

  After checking into the Hotel Commodore, adjacent to Grand Central Station on 42nd Street, Schmeling received Brundage in his room. Brundage asked for—and received—Schmeling’s assurance that black and Jewish athletes would be welcome at the games in Berlin. Schmeling also delivered the letter he was carrying from the German Olympic committee, more or less repeating its promise that it was practicing fairness in all respects. “In retrospect, it was incredibly naive of me to guarantee things that were completely beyond my control,” Schmeling later wrote in his memoirs.

  On December 8, Schmeling took a ride to Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, where for the first time he met Joe Louis. Schmeling’s old friend Paul Gallico was among the writers covering the Louis camp in the days leading up to his fight with Paulino Uzcudun on December 13. Sitting a few feet from the ring where Louis spent the better part of an hour beating up his sparring partners, Gallico and Schmeling watched the young fighter closely. The crowd inside the small gym reflected the diversity of the fight game—whites and blacks mingling, trading barbs, exchanging handshakes. Unlike Jack Johnson, the only black heavyweight champion to that point, Joe Louis excited most white boxing fans. He was their hope, too. Surveying this scene with Gallico, Schmeling must have been reminded of the situation in Germany, which had seriously deteriorated—from the Jewish viewpoint, anyway—with the passage a few weeks earlier of the Nuremberg Laws.

  As they chatted about Braddock and Louis and the state of the sport, Gallico turned to Schemling and asked a serious question. “What would old Adolf have to say if you lost to a black man?”

  “I don’t think he would care much.” Schmeling’s English was good, but his accent was thick, as heavy as the marzipan cake he so enjoyed.

  “Well, would he approve of a fight against Louis?”

  Schmeling paused. “The Führer,” he said, his tone just shy of sarcasm, “has other things to worry about.”

  Moving on, Gallico said, “Well, what about the Olympics? You know we’re sending over a bunch of Negro boys, and some people here think they might be in danger in Berlin.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Schmeling chuckled, the way a villainous German officer might in a Hollywood movie. At moments like these, it was easy to see why he was called the Black Uhlan. “All Germans know how good the American Negroes are,” he said. “We know they will beat our German runners. It’s not important that they win—as long as our Germans make a good showing.”

  Meanwhile, as Gallico and Schmeling went back and forth about how America’s blacks might be received at the Olympics, the boycott question was being decided across the Hudson at the Hotel Commodore. Finally, after more than two years of debate, the Amateur Athletic Union delegates were deciding whether to sanction American participation in Hitler’s Olympics. Technically, the AAU could not veto American participation; that power belonged solely to the American Olympic Committee. But if the AAU voted to boycott the games, the AOC would find itself in an almost untenable position. Both politically and financially, the AOC would be hard-pressed to send teams to the winter games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the summer games in Berlin. As the New York Times noted on its front page on December 7, “The principal effect of the resolution, as analyzed by committee members on both sides of the question, is intended to be moral.”

  There would be practical consequences as well. For instance, the AAU would not organize and conduct Olympic trials, which had always been its primary Olympics-related function. It was not the AOC but the AAU, as the master of the trials, which certified American athletes for the Olympics. If passed, the resolution would also strongly encourage, if not actually compel, those AAU members who sat on the American Olympic Committee to work toward a boycott.

  For his part, Brundage was defiant. “If necessary,” he said, “we will form our own organization and send a fully representative team of certified amateurs. Our athletes must not be denied the chance to carry the Stars and Stripes to victory abroad just because of treason for political reasons in some quarters at home.”

  The meeting was more or less a fiasco. The resolution “calling upon” American athletes not to participate in the games was tabled by a vote of 61.55 to 55.45 (some districts divided their votes and some emeritus members had partial votes), but the vote was quickly followed by an ugly parliamentary quarrel. Pro-boycott forces insisted that they had been cheated out of the two hours they said they had been allotted to speak in favor of their cause. “It was double-crossing by men who claim to be sports,” Charles L. Ornstein harrumphed. “We will enter into no further agreements [with the opposition]. In that spirit I will offer an amendment to their resolution and on that we will stand and fight.”

  Their resolution, which had passed, called for the United States team to go to Germany. Ornstein’s amendment called for the opposite, in effect an effort to negate the resolution it was amending. Naturally Brundage protested. But Mahoney, the chairman of the convention, said that Ornstein was in order. At one point during the increasingly heated debate, Mahoney addressed the floor. “I am glad the motion to prevent discussion by tabling and compromise has been frustrated,” he said. “We will now have a discussion of a moral principle more important than anything which has ever come before a sports governing body.” Pausing for dramatic effect, he looked out across the room. “The Nazi government,” he said, “wants more than American participation in a sporting contest. It wants to bring the American dollar into the very weakened Nazi treasury. And it wants to picture Hitler with Uncle Sam standing behind him and saying, ‘We are with you, Adolf!’”

  This was more than a rhetorical flourish. However hypocritical the AAU leadership might have been, however laggard when it came to racial integration in the United States, Mahoney spoke the truth. After years of debate, if the United States was to send its teams to the Olympics, its action would be viewed universally as nothing less than a validation of the Third Reich, which had just stripped its Jewish citizens of their most basic rights.

  Initially Avery Brundage had based his position on the principle of the separation of politics and sport. But by December 1935 he had immersed himself in international politics. More than even Father Charles Coughlin, the Canadian-born priest whose fascist leanings became most pronounced only after 1936, Brundage had become the preeminent American apologist for Nazi Germany.

  After their bitter and divisive afternoon, the AAU’s delegates put on their tuxedoes and sat down to have dinner together. As gentlemen, they had agreed that the Olympics would not be discussed at their gala. But
to the enduring resentment of the Mahoney forces, Brigadier General Charles Sherrill stood up from his seat in the Hotel Commodore’s ballroom and brandished the November 21 edition of the Times of London. Linking the American boycott effort with international communism, Sherrill read aloud a Times dispatch from Riga, Latvia: “One of the immediate tasks (of the International of Communist Youth in Russia) is to defeat the plans for holding the next Olympic games in Germany.” He also read a letter from an official of the Archdiocese of New York, clearing him, as far as it was concerned, of the charge of anti-Catholicism, which had been made against him by The Commonweal. Then Sherrill sat back down and finished his meal.

  The next day the delegates were back at it. For five hours proboycott and anti-boycott forces waged a pitched rhetorical battle, speaker after speaker taking the floor to exchange rebuttals. The focus of the debate was another resolution, technically a proposal by Judge Aron Steuer to send a committee to Germany to investigate conditions there, in actuality the last resort of the boycott forces to continue their fight. Mahoney and Brundage allowed their fellow delegates to do most of the talking. In addition to Sherrill, Gustavus T. Kirby, the former AAU president; John T. McGovern, the president of the Intercollegiate Amateur Athletic Association of America; and Fred L. Steers, the AAU’s third vice president, spoke against the boycott. “What you are trying here,” Steers said, “is not a case of sporting discrimination, but a moral judgment on Germany as a whole, which we have no right to impose on our athletes.” Then Steers revealed that he and some colleagues had conducted a poll of all the American athletes who had finished first, second, or third at the most recent AAU championships and the most recent NCAA outdoor championships, as well as those who held world records in track and field. “Out of one hundred and forty replies,” Steers said, “we received only one against participation. That was from Herman Neugass of Tulane University.” (Neugass, a Jew, had finished third, behind Owens, in the 220-yard dash at the NCAA outdoor championships in June. He had probably had some lengthy talks about the proposed boycott with Ernest Lee Jahncke, who was the number-two man at Tulane and an old friend of Theodor Lewald’s.)