The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

by Sheldon Anderson

  It wasn’t so bad that she beat us, but did you see her turn half way down the track to see where we were?

  —Canadian sprinter Dallas Creamer, after losing to Walsh in the 220-yard dash

  By the time Stella Walsh entered high school in the fall of 1926, she had grown to nearly 5-foot-6, dwarfing her 4-foot-10 mother and topping her 5-foot-4 father. In her first race for the South High Flyers, she won the 50-yard dash. “Flyer” was the nickname given to virtually every sprinter of the time, so Walsh became the Flyers’ “Flyer.” Her first big track and field meet was the Junior Olympics in 1927, sponsored by the Cleveland Press, which advertised the event as “seeking Olympic athletes.” Walsh won the 50- and 70-yard sprints, and came in second in the standing broad jump and baseball throw.

  The odds were long for a young Polish immigrant girl from Russia to gain notoriety in American sports. In the early twentieth century, most avenues to fame and fortune for women were closed, including sports. Few women rose to prominence in big business or national politics, but some gained celebrity in the movies, dance, and literature. After World War I, women asserted themselves into male bailiwicks as never before, including the worlds of film and sports, but with strong push back from the guardians of mainstream bourgeois American culture.

  Women’s sports were not an important part of the cultural scene in the 1920s. Hollywood had far greater impact on American society. The most famous Polish American woman in the United States at the time was world-renowned film actress Pola Negri, born Barbara Apollonia Chalupec in 1897, in Lipno, a small Russian-Polish town about 30 miles southwest of Wierzchownia. Negri’s film career paralleled Walsh’s rise to the top of the track and field world. Negri also knew that her future in Russia was bleak. Her father had been thrown into a Warsaw prison for his involvement in the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution. Negri once said that “our people were ground down by the Russian, Austrian, and German oppressors, and nowhere was our lot worse than in the provinces governed by Russian officials.”1

  Like Walsh, Negri was not known by her given name. Pola was short for Apollonia, and she took the name Negri from famous Italian poet Ada Negri. Pola Negri first entered the theater scene in Warsaw, but she saw few prospects there. Near the end of World War I, she moved to Berlin to make films, where she worked with brilliant German director Ernst Lubitsch. For her 1987 obituary, the New York Times wrote that she was a “startlingly beautiful woman, with skin as delicately white as fine porcelain, jet black hair, and flashing dark-green eyes.”2

  Negri made many great silent films in Germany and Hollywood (some of them are lost), establishing herself as one of the first movie “vamps”—women who lured unsuspecting, helpless men into their irresistible clutches and to ultimate doom. Gloria Swanson was her main rival for these roles, and Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich followed in their footsteps. “I was the first,” Negri bragged. “And I was the best.”3 Although the femme fatale was a familiar theatrical role, the movies exposed the masses to the dangerous idea that women could control men. “I was the star who introduced sex to the screen,” she said, “but it was sex in good taste.” 4

  Poland’s Pola Negri was one of the great silent film stars and Rudolph Valentino’s lover. Library of Congress.

  Negri became a huge celebrity in Los Angeles in the decade before Stella Walsh arrived at the 1932 Olympics. Negri was the lover of the notorious lothario Rudolph Valentino, and she claimed to be engaged to marry the dashing film star, although he denied it. In June 1926, Hollywood’s darling couple went to Grauman’s Theater for the premier of Valentino’s last film, Son of Sheik. Following a cast party at the famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Valentino left on a publicity tour. In New York, he suddenly collapsed with a gastric ulcer and appendicitis. On August 23, Valentino died from peritonitis. He was thirty-one. Negri was crushed, at least in public. She went to New York for the funeral, where she wept inconsolably. The news of Valentino’s death was plastered all over the August 24 edition of the Plain Dealer. Walsh, who loved to go to the movies, was undoubtedly following press accounts of Valentino’s passing and Negri’s funereal swoon.

  For most of her film career, Negri’s voice was never heard, and yet the Polish temptress exploded on the silent screen with an exotic Slavic sensuality that put her on the watch list of Americans who wanted to protect their image of a pure, chaste woman. One critic said that she seemed to “have a little dirt behind her neck.”5Although the Hays Film Code of 1934 put a temporary end to the overt portrayal of the “bad girl” in Hollywood films, Walsh and other female athletes were also challenging the conventional gendered order of things—not as hypersexualized femmes fatales, but as women on a field of play that was dominated by men. Pola Negri titillated men, while Stella Walsh beat them.

  The sophisticated, cosmopolitan, beautiful Negri seemed to be everything that Walsh, the modest, plain-looking, young sprinter from Cleveland, was not. But Walsh’s métier was also a silent stage. She carved out her public persona on the track, the basketball court, and the softball diamond. On the field of play, few words were spoken; off it, media coverage of women’s sports was negligible, so Walsh could compete with little fanfare. Walsh was a shy, private person anyway. In competition she could forget about any questions of her national allegiance and snide comments about her masculine looks. The one unambiguous, clear identity Walsh had was on the track, where the lanes were straight, the measurements exact, and the winners and losers clear. There she could be judged simply on the basis of how fast she ran.

  Walsh was not a “looker”—in the parlance of the time—so the success she had running and playing games gave her newfound confidence. It was often a lonely existence for these women who lived on the frontier of a man’s world—Goldman, Luxemburg, Sklodowska Curie, Negri, and Walsh. Awkward in social situations and troubled by her own sexuality, the adulation Walsh received on the track liberated Stanisława Walasiewicz.

  The gradual rise in women’s opportunities to compete in sports after World War I paralleled Stella Walsh’s rise in the track and field world. Her victories on the cinders brought unlikely notoriety for the quiet, reserved immigrant girl. In the late 1920s, she competed in sports in and around the Cleveland area, but the teenager was unknown throughout the rest of the United States and Europe. The big names in American women’s sports at the time were the great tennis player Helen Wills and all-around athlete Mildred “Babe” Didrikson. Didrikson was the same age as Walsh, and they both played softball and basketball, and did track and field.

  Women faced stiff resistance to participating in “men’s” sports. At the turn of the century, it was acceptable for women of leisure to play such genteel lawn games as bowling, tennis, and golf, but the gatekeepers of traditional gender norms judged strenuous exercise unladylike, uncomely, and dangerous to a woman’s health. Maud Watson was one of the first English tennis champions in the late nineteenth century. In 1935, she told Helen Wills about the reaction to women playing the game in those days:

  When I began to play tennis, I hit balls against the wall in our garden. My father was a vicar and a very broad-minded man for those days. He let me and my sisters play in a match in Hurlingham, which we won. People thought it was scandalous that he should let us play in public! We enjoyed it, though.6

  Women tennis players had to wear long dresses and broad-brimmed hats, making it impossible to do an overhead serve. High-heeled boots further restricted movement, but then volleying, according to one tennis manual, was off limits: “The volley game is not made for ladies. It is too quick, and is too great a strain on the system.”7

  Sweating was for men and manual laborers. There was an old saying that if a girl finished first in sports she would finish last in the race to find a husband. Walsh, along with many other courageous sportswomen, challenged these traditional gender norms. Plain Dealer sports columnist James Doyle wrote a little ditty that underscored the stigma facing women a
thletes: “Twinkle, twinkle, parva Stella. You run too fast for any fella.”8

  Harriet Fitzgerald, a top official in the northeast Ohio Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) in the 1920s, left the organization because of its increasingly liberal ideas about women participating in sports. Fitzgerald maintained that doing hard sports would irreparably damage a woman’s body. Walsh’s neighborhood friend Frances Kaszubski, who became one of the greatest shot putters and discus throwers in the United States after World War II, remembered that Fitzgerald “made it known throughout the Cleveland school system—in fact all northeast Ohio—that if you competed on such a level you could never have a child.” Kaszubski said that one girl was such a good athlete that “her parents made her join a convent to prevent her from playing basketball.”9

  In the early Olympics, women were relegated to swimming and tennis competitions. Frenchman Pierre Coubertin, the pioneer of the modern Olympics, had lobbied hard to keep women out of the competition altogether. “The Olympic Games must be reserved for men,” he declared. Although French enlightened philosophers and political theorists provided the foundation for the American Revolution and French Revolution, and the idea of equality according to law, women had to wait. After World War I, women in most West European countries and the United States got the franchise, while French women finally received the vote at the end of World War II. Coubertin once said that the “French would accept equality as long as it was not openly displayed and did not change deep-rooted traditions.” Coubertin was not opposed to women exercising in private, but the spectacle of women running and jumping around in shorts in full public view was anathema to the conservative Frenchman. He warned that if there were women runners or soccer players in the Olympics, “would such sports practiced by women constitute an edifying sight before crowds assembled for an Olympiad?”10

  Undoubtedly, the antics of famous French shot putter Violette Morriss, holder of the world record, appalled Coubertin. The imposing, stout, and muscular Morriss played all sports, and during World War I she was an ambulance driver on the western front. In 1921, she won the javelin and shot put at an international women’s meet in Monte Carlo. She had a short-lived marriage in the early 1920s but was hardly the domestic type. Morriss smashed traditional gender roles by cross-dressing, chain-smoking, flaunting her bisexuality, and undergoing a mastectomy to better play sports and drive race cars. She often posed for photos behind the wheel of a sports car, dressed in a suit and tie, with pomaded short hair and a cigarette dangling from her mouth. It was a shocking image for the times. In 1927, Morriss won the prestigious Bol d’Or auto race.

  In the 1920s, Frenchwoman Violette Morriss broke gender norms in athletics and auto racing, prompting outrage from male sport authorities. National Library of France.

  Coubertin’s persistent bias against women participating in the Olympics prompted Frenchwoman Alice Milliat to launch a parallel women’s Olympic movement. Milliat helped form the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI) in Paris in 1921. The FSFI held four women’s world competitions in the interwar period, opposite of the Olympic years: the Women’s Olympic Games in 1922 and 1926, and the Women’s World Games in 1930 and 1934 (the International Olympic Committee [IOC] successfully lobbied against Milliat’s use of the term “Olympics”). United States Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage said of Milliat, “She was active for years, and she demanded more and more. She made quite a nuisance of herself.”11 The first Women’s Olympics in Paris, in 1922, attracted athletes from five countries to compete in eleven different disciplines. Walsh ran in the 1930 and 1934 Games.

  Until the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, women were only allowed to compete in swimming, tennis, and figure-skating events. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the conservative governing body for track and field, finally bent to Milliat’s constant pressure, and women were allowed to compete in official track and field events at Amsterdam, albeit on a temporary basis. Five events were staged: the 100 and 800 meters, the high jump, the discus, and the 80-meter hurdles. When some of the exhausted runners fell onto the cinder track after the 800-meter race, the New York Times wrote, “Even this distance makes too great a call on feminine strength.”12 The IOC took the event off the women’s Olympic track and field program until the 1960 Rome Olympics. The 1,500 meters for women debuted at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and women did not run an Olympic marathon until the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

  Milliat had to be diplomatic in her quest for equality for women’s sports, knowing that the doyens of international sport were adamantly opposed to her movement. Violette Morriss went too far in confounding gender norms, even for Milliat. The French athletic federation banned Morriss before the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. According to historian Jean Williams, “Morris [sic] was distanced by Milliat from ‘respectable’ FSFI competition in the late 1920s and failed in a much-publicized court case to have her competitor’s license restored in 1929.”13 Evidently the Nazis invited the disaffected Morriss to the 1936 Olympic Games, where she was received by Hitler. She worked on and off for the German secret police before and during World War II, earning the moniker “Hyena of the Gestapo.” French resistance forces assassinated her in 1944.

  Coubertin, Brundage, and the other upper-class men on the IOC could tolerate women playing tennis and swimming, but they were vehemently opposed to the idea of women doing track and field. Brundage told the New York Times that the “ancient Greeks kept women out of their athletic games. They wouldn’t even let them on the sidelines. I’m not so sure, but they were right.”14 The pope was of the same mind. “After twenty centuries of Christianity,” Pius XI wrote in 1928, “the sensitiveness and attention to the delicate care due young women and girls should be shown to have fallen lower than pagan Rome.”15 Morriss confirmed their worst fears of what this uncivilized spectacle would become.

  Halina Konopacka, the most famous Polish female athlete of the time, helped change attitudes toward women in the Olympics. Born eleven years before Walsh in Rawa Mazowiecka, in Russian Poland, Konopacka was a svelte, attractive, long-necked brunette. Like Morriss and Walsh, she dabbled in many different sports, including skiing, tennis, swimming, basketball, and team handball. She burst onto the Polish athletic scene by winning the discus throw at the 1924 Polish National Championships. Konopacka hoped to compete at the 1924 Paris Olympics, but women’s track and field was not yet on the program.

  Poland struggled to field a men’s team for the first postwar Olympics in Antwerp, let alone a women’s contingent. At a meeting in Kraków in 1919, Polish sports officials formed an Olympic Committee and looked forward to sending a team to Antwerp. The committee even made a poster dedicated to the event. But the new Polish government did not have the funds to adequately support an Olympic team. The fledgling state was recovering from the devastation of World War I and had to coordinate the bureaucracies and economies of the former German, Austrian, and Russian territories. About two-thirds of the population worked in the agricultural sector, and the land reform after the war only covered 6 percent of the land. Most Polish peasants were still desperately poor, small subsistence farmers.

  Polish industry also lagged behind the rest of Europe. Many of Poland’s trading connections that had existed before World War I were now cut off. For example, Łódz was a major textile center that had supplied the Russian Empire, but with the emergence of the new Soviet state that market dried up. In the interwar period, trade with the Soviet Union amounted to less than 1 percent of Poland’s total trade. In the mid-1920s, shipments of Polish coal from the former Prussian region of Upper Silesia to Germany were blocked by tariffs. Commerce was further impeded by rail lines that often connected the three parts of Poland to the partitioning empires but not to other regions within the new Poland. Even the rail gauge between former Prussian and Russian Poland was different. Devastating inflation hit Poland in 1921, and in 1929, the Great Depression sent the Polish economy into a tailspin. Fr
om 1929 to 1932, industrial production fell by nearly two-thirds.

  The recurrent economic crises unsettled the politics of the Polish Second Republic, and Marshal Piłsudski ended the political stalemate by taking dictatorial power in May 1926. The “May Coup” remains a controversial topic in Polish history. The political and social divide in Poland was so wide that one British historian observed, “If the Second Republic had not been foully [sic] murdered in 1939, by external agents [the Germans], there is little doubt that it would have soon sickened from internal causes.”16

  Poland sent its first Olympic team to the 1924 Paris Olympics. Sixty-five Polish athletes competed, winning two medals, a silver in team cycling and a bronze in equestrian. Polish sports authorities showed little interest in women’s sports. Fencer Wanda Dubieńska was the lone woman on the team, and she lost all five of her matches. When Stella Walsh competed for Poland at the 1932 Los Angeles Games, there were still only nine women on the fifty-one-member Polish team.

  Piłsudski was acutely aware of Poland’s precarious geopolitical situation between revanchist Germany and the Soviet Union, and he made the strength of the Polish Army a top priority. Poland followed a long British and continental tradition of linking organized sports with the development of disciplined, healthy, and fit foot soldiers. As the Polish economy stabilized in the late 1920s, Piłsudski began to devote more resources to physical education in schools and sporting activities in general. In 1927, he formed the Urząd Wychowania Fizycznego i Przysposobienia Wojskowego [State Council of Physical Education and Military Training]. The effort was only marginally successful. From 1924 to the last interwar Olympics in Berlin in 1936, Poles won twenty medals in the Summer Olympics. Hungary, with half the population of Poland, won forty-nine.