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

by Jeremy Schaap

  The measurements confirmed what had been clear even to those seated in the farthest reaches of the stadium. Owens had smashed the Olympic record again, jumping 26 feet, 5½ inches. In the space of two hours, he had taken five jumps, all of them better than the previous Olympic record. His record—though 3 inches shorter than his jump in Ann Arbor fourteen months earlier—would stand for twenty-four years. (Ultimately, the marks of Owens and Long would not count as Olympic records because of the tailwind.)

  Before Owens could dust himself off, Luz Long ran to congratulate him, throwing his right arm around Owens’s shoulders. Then, turning to the side of the stadium where Hitler was seated, Long clutched Jesse’s right hand with his left and hoisted their arms into the air. Together, Long and Owens paraded across the infield, hand in hand.

  It is impossible to say whether the Chancellor noticed Long’s eternal act of sportsmanship. Regardless, he was so impressed by the silver medalist’s efforts that he insisted on congratulating him, in the private room behind his viewing stand, before leaving the stadium. Since Owens had won again, the American press corps wanted to see how Hitler would react. “His eagerness to receive the youthful German,” Arthur Daley wrote, “was so great that the Führer condescended to wait until his emissaries had pried Long loose from Owens, with whom he was affectionately walking along the track arm and arm. All the Negro received was his second gold medal, which probably satisfied him well enough at that.”

  Now that it was apparent that Jesse Owens was the true superstar of the games, the Nazi press, which had toned down its rhetoric for several days, turned it back up. In particular, Der Angriff (The Attack) lived up to its name. “If America didn’t have her black auxiliaries, where would she be in the Olympic Games?” Der Angriff asked after Owens won the broad jump. Conceding that the Americans were likely to continue to win medals, the paper petulantly pointed out, “But if the Americans hadn’t enlisted her black auxiliary forces, it would have been a poor lookout for them. For then the German, Luz Long, would have won the broad jump; the Italian Mario Lanzi, the 800 meters run, and the Hollander Martin Osendarp, the 100 meters. The world would then have described the Yankees a great Olympic disappointment. It must be plainly stated that the Americans aren’t the athletic marvels we thought they were despite Owens, Metcalfe, Woodruff and Johnson.”

  For more than seventy years, Der Angriff’s diatribe has been cited as the ultimate example of German hostility to Jesse Owens and his black teammates. But its words, if not its tone, were nearly identical to those of Grantland Rice, whose oft-used phrase “darktown parade” was in its own way as offensive as Der Angriff’s “black auxiliaries.”

  Rice—and, to be fair, most of his colleagues in the American media—was as preoccupied with the racial question as the staff of Der Angriff. Describing the atmosphere at the Olympic stadium on August 4, he wrote, “Tuesday was a dark, raw day of rain and wind, but it looked even darker to the fifty other nations participating in the Olympic Games as our Ethiopian troops continued their deadly fire.” He wrote that Glenn Hardin, the champion in the 400-meter hurdles, “startled the German multitude by proving that the United States had a white man who could win.”

  Hardin’s victory notwithstanding, Rice lamented the decline of the white American track-and-field star, which must have come as something of a shock, considering how thoroughly white Americans from Alvin Kraenzlein to Johnny Hayes to Ray Ewry to Charley Paddock had dominated the Olympic track-and-field competitions since their revival in 1896. “The collapse of the American whites has been terrific,” Rice wrote. “Apparently the race here is to the swift, and the black and sepia are too strong.” And then a nod to Kipling: “The white man’s burden has broken the white man’s back as far as America is concerned; the United States would be outclassed except for our black-skinned frontal and flanking fire.”

  Joe Williams, Rice’s counterpart at the New York World-Telegram, was equally blunt. “It begins to look as if we will have to make the ‘Darktown Strutters’ Ball’ the official hymn of the American Olympiad,” he wrote. On the subject specifically of Owens, he was more benign, continuing, “I do not like to invite unsavory criticism by discussing the beauty of a man’s legs, but no worker in bronze could improve on the gracefully powerful lines of this young gent’s underpinnings. He is built like a Man o’ War colt and geared just as high for speed.”

  After the broad-jump medal ceremony, Rice was able to track down Owens for a quick interview. Like most of his colleagues, he was more curious about Owens’s perception of his treatment at the hands of Hitler than about his struggle to qualify for the broad-jump semifinals.

  “I haven’t even thought about it,” Owens told Rice. “I suppose Mr. Hitler is much too busy a man to stay out there forever. After all, he’d been there most of the day. Anyway, he did wave in my direction as he left the field and I sort of felt he was waving at me. I didn’t bother about it one way or the other.”

  While Owens continued to deny that there had been a snub, it remained a dominant theme in the papers back home. Itching for a fight, the Daily Worker decried the Führer’s treatment of Owens, continuing to ignore Owens’s own account of what had happened. The Worker gave front-page coverage to Angelo Herndon, the chairman of the Youth Committee of the Communist Election Campaign Committee, when he issued a statement simultaneously calling for the defeat of Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential election and condemning Hitler for his “insults” to Owens and other black American athletes in Berlin. “The crowning achievements of Jesse Owens and other American Negro athletes have been ignored by Hitler,” Herndon said in his statement. “Leading Nazi papers carry vicious headlines such as ‘German is first white man to finish’ when announcing results of a contest in which a German [Long] finished second to Owens.” Then, because he couldn’t help himself, Herndon equated Landon with Hitler. “The Nazi Olympics,” he said, “have given American Negro youth a picture of what they may expect in the United States if the reactionary forces represented by the Liberty League-Hearst-Landon combination triumph.” (Apparently Jesse Owens didn’t make the connection. He campaigned for Alf Landon, against Franklin D. Roosevelt, after he returned from Europe in late August. In fact, Owens famously said while on the stump, “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”)

  Despite the triumphs of Owens, Woodruff, and Johnson, the games were going along smashingly for the Germans. All that they had hoped to achieve they were achieving—and more. Not even the most optimistic among them had expected their athletes to win so many medals of all hues. More important, the Germans were proving—as Jeremiah T. Mahoney and William L. Shirer and so many others had feared—that their new regime was capable of a certain kind of greatness. “The games were overshadowed,” Thomas Wolfe wrote, “and were no longer merely sporting competitions to which other nations had sent their chosen teams. They became, day after day, an orderly and overwhelming demonstration in which the whole of Germany had been schooled and disciplined. It was as if the games had been chosen as a symbol of the new collective might, a means of showing to the world in concrete terms what this new power had come to be.”

  But at the center of it all, Wolfe wrote, was Jesse Owens: “Everywhere the air was filled with a single voice. The green trees along Kurfurstendamm began to talk: from loudspeakers concealed in their branches an announcer in the stadium spoke to the whole city . . . Owens—Oo Ess Ah!”

  Yet the power and prestige of the Third Reich were far from Jesse Owens’s thoughts as he retreated to the athletes’ village after a grueling and magnificent day at the stadium. As tired as he was, he made a point of seeking out Luz Long. He found him in his cottage, reading on his bed. Long got up, embraced Owens, and in his halting English invited him to sit down. For the next several hours, Long and Owens communicated as best they could in English, sharing their hopes and their fears, opening up to each other in ways they had rarely, if ever, opened up to anyon
e else. One was American, the other German, one black, the other white, one poor, one middle-class, but they found common ground as athletes and sportsmen in a world increasingly dominated by dictators. In the face of so much global uncertainty, they could sense that their Olympic medals would do little to shield them. Owens, after all, was going home to a country deep in depression, in which his skin made him an outcast. More politically aware than Owens, Long was deeply conscious of what his country was becoming and afraid of where it was going. His father’s generation had been all but wiped out in the trenches, and yet less than twenty years later, his most powerful countrymen were in another bellicose mood.

  Regardless of the distance and differences that divided them, Owens and Long made a pact to remain in contact. The adrenaline coursing through their veins had long since been drained. Now they were simply exhausted. They said their goodbyes, and Owens went back to his cottage. As he tried to fall asleep, though, he could not keep his mind from replaying all the day’s dramas. There was Hitler and Long, the races and the jumps. Eventually, finally, his brain shut down, and he slept.

  18

  “He Flies Like the Hindenburg”: Day Four

  * * *

  BERLIN: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1936

  AFTER THE HIGH DRAMA of the 100-meter finals and the broad-jump competition, even Owens expected the 200-meter semifinals and final to be anticlimactic. Since he did not have to be at the stadium until 3 P.M., he tried to sleep in—but it was impossible. His cottage had become a landmark in the Olympic village. Fans and fellow athletes were constantly peering in his windows, trying to catch a glimpse of the world’s greatest athlete. When the commotion eventually woke him up, he did so to the thought that in all likelihood this would be his final day as an Olympic competitor; his life’s work was within hours of completion. It seemed inconceivable that he would fail to win his third gold medal. After all, there were only two men in the world he considered capable of defeating him at 200 meters, and neither would be in the race. Eulace Peacock was home in New Jersey nursing his torn hamstring, and Ralph Metcalfe would be a mere spectator, having failed to qualify for the 200 meters back on Randall’s Island. Bobby Packard and Mack Robinson were decent enough runners, but they inspired in Owens no dread whatsoever.

  In this event, if in no other, Owens would be competing for records more than medals. But again it seemed the weather—the coldest ever at the summer Olympics, and pouring rain—would not cooperate.

  Meanwhile, back at home, Owens’s victories at 100 meters and in the broad jump had made him an icon overnight. “It is my pleasure to convey to you the congratulations of the people of your State for your brilliant achievements in the Olympic Games,” Governor Martin L. Davey of Ohio cabled to Owens. (There was no similar telegram from the governor of Owens’s native state.)

  In Washington, Shirley Povich of the Post was among the many who had decided to cast Owens’s victory as nothing less than the triumph of good over evil. “Hitler declared Aryan supremacy by decree,” Povich wrote, “but Jesse Owens is proving him a liar by degrees.” Povich went a step further, lauding Owens at the expense of the man he had suddenly replaced as the world’s preeminent black athlete.

  It was a year ago at this time that Washington Negroes couldn’t see Jesse Owens in their midst for craning their necks at Joe Louis. It struck this department at the time that the colored folks of the Capital were shamefully neglecting a man of their race who was destined for even greater fame than Louis. But a year later finds their positions reversed. Jesse Owens, making Olympic history, with two titles already won and another looming today, is quite the undisputed idol of his race, or should be.

  Back in Berlin, American reporters asked Louis’s vanquisher what he thought about all those black men winning gold medals. “They are great and Mr. Owens is the most perfect athlete I have ever seen,” Max Schmeling replied. Then, searching for exactly the right simile—albeit one that in nine months would be outdated by tragedy in the sky over Lakehurst, New Jersey—the Black Uhlan added, “He flies like the Hindenburg.”

  Of course, Owens’s victories were only part of the biggest story of the games—the unprecedented brilliance of the so-called black auxiliaries. As Robert L. Vann declared in the Pittsburgh Courier, “America’s ‘athletes of bronze’ are marching today—AND THEY CAN’T BE STOPPED!”

  In The New Yorker, Janet Flanner, writing under the nom de plume Genet, was characteristically droll as she delighted in tweaking the Nazis. “Though it can’t be what Germany arranged the games for,” she wrote,

  the racial superiority of the Negro athletes has so far been the signal ethnological demonstration of Berlin’s Olympiad. Owens, Johnson, Metcalfe, Albritton, Woodruff, as alike in their stylized physique as the dark archaic figures on an Attic vase, have established in the sporting arena a sort of new muscular mythology in which they are the fast and far-leaping gods, against whom pale mortals haven’t a chance. In their events, Negroes have given not performance but phenomena.

  Even as Owens was adding to his collection of gold medals, he too was putting his achievements in the larger context. In an open letter to the Courier’s readers, he wrote, apparently with Vann’s assistance, “I am proud that I am an American. I see the sun breaking through the clouds when I realize that millions of Americans will recognize now that what I and the boys of my race are trying to do is attempted for the glory of our country and our countrymen. Maybe more people will now realize that the Negro is trying to do his full part as an American citizen.”

  Here again was an example of Owens’s careful politics—the tone one of conciliation rather than confrontation. Although this tone would diminish him in the eyes of the black militants of the 1960s, in Berlin in 1936, Owens was a true revolutionary, fighting against the ugliest regime on the planet, embarrassing Hitler, Goebbels, Streicher, and the rest of the Nazi leadership simply by being at his best.

  None of this had weighed on Owens in the first few days of competition. He had been content to win. Now, though, he was the leading figure of the games, the man who was standing in for all minorities everywhere in their struggles against tyrants. He had gone to Berlin expecting to compete against Metcalfe and Long; finally he was willing to accept that all along he had been competing against Hitler. Long’s skepticism about the regime, expressed in their late-night conversation, had hardened Owens’s attitude. He did not quite know where his new feelings would take him or how he might act on them, but he knew suddenly, at some level, that he had been politicized. Snyder had always downplayed the politics of sport—not unlike Brundage—and Owens had been happy to be guided by self-interest. With his medals in hand, though, he was finally secure enough to express his real opinions.

  At noon he caught a bus to the stadium and spent most of the ride posing for pictures and signing autographs. If anything, his fellow Olympians were more awed by him than the general public was. “It seems to me that Jesse is spending most of his time here smiling for the birdie,” Snyder carped to a reporter. Owens, through it all, kept smiling.

  “Hey, Jesse,” Snyder said when they found each other at the stadium. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Great, coach,” Owens lied. “I feel terrific.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  In the semifinals, Owens looked good but not quite terrific. Surprisingly, he did not even equal the Olympic record he had set the day before, running the curved sprint in 21.3 seconds, two tenths of a second slower than the previous day. Meanwhile, in the other semifinal, Mack Robinson tied the record and Canada’s Lee Orr ran, like Owens, a 21.3. It occurred to Owens that winning his third gold medal might not be quite so easy. But that thought was fleeting. He would have almost three full hours in which to nap before the final, which he assumed would be his last Olympic event. With a little shuteye, he would be back on the track at his best for the final.

  To be sure, Mack Robinson was not the equal of Metcalfe or Peacock, but he was a prodigious talent nevertheless. Despit
e a congenital heart defect, he was among the world’s fastest men, and he would eventually jump more than 25 feet. A mere freshman at Pasadena Junior College, he had had to find two local businessmen to finance his trip to Randall’s Island and even in Berlin often seemed to be the forgotten man among the American sprinters. As Robertson, Cromwell, and Snyder were fighting over Owens on the voyage to Europe and in their first days in Berlin, Robinson had felt largely ignored by the cadre of American coaches—and later said so.

  But Robinson needed more than a coach could offer to defeat Owens that evening at the Olympic stadium. Owens ran arguably his greatest race of the games. On a muddy track, heading into the wind, with the temperature dipping to 55 degrees, he ran a blistering 20.7 seconds, shattering the world record for the distance around a curve. In fact, his time was only one tenth of a second slower than the record for 200 meters on a straightaway. Robinson also ran brilliantly, but his 21.1 put him well behind Owens at the tape.

  “[Owens] looked like a dark streak of lightning,” Rice wrote. “His final performance in breaking all records for 200 meters under miserable conditions, with a rain-soaked track, left the athletes of fifty-one nations goggle-eyed with astonishment.”

  As Owens crossed the finish line, the stadium again erupted in appreciation of his genius. Tens of thousands of Germans rose to their feet, whistling because they thought it was what Americans did, cheering, as best they could, a black American. Some reporters took German support for Owens as a sign that the government’s discriminatory policies did not reflect the will of the people. “If the Olympics clearly demonstrate this,” Frederick T. Birchall wrote in the New York Times, “and this perhaps brings about some amelioration of the racial persecution in Germany, the location of the games in Berlin will have had its advantages. However, this is almost too much to hope for, because after the tumult and the shouting of the Olympics is over, all the realities of German politics will come to the fore again.” Birchall could not have been more prescient.