Stephens raced Walsh for the first time at the AAU Indoor Championships in St. Louis in March 1935. Stephens tended to exaggerate her rivalry with Walsh, and much of what she said later fudged the truth. She claimed that before the race she had put up a picture of Walsh on her wall to throw darts at it. A few years after Walsh’s death in 1980, Stephens recalled that when she heard that she was to race the Olympic champion, she said, “So what? She can eat dirt as far as I’m concerned.”54 Walsh was equally dismissive of the young Missourian. Before the race, Walsh called Stephens “that greenie from the sticks.”55 Walsh was more worried about facing 1928 Olympic gold medalist Betty Robinson, but Robinson did not attend the meet.56
Walsh’s nemesis, Helen Stephens. Library of Congress.
Walsh thought the race would be an easy win, but Stephens beat her in the 50 meters. The Missouri crowd went wild. Upon being congratulated for beating the “fastest woman in the world,” Stephens supposedly replied, “Who is Stella Walsh?” When Walsh heard about Stephens’s comment, she called it a “fluke” and claimed that Stephens had jumped the gun: “I don’t like to complain,” Walsh said. “But I was robbed.” At a high school pep rally after the meet, Stephens once again delighted the crowd by repeating, “Who is Stella Walsh?”57 The Missouri press dubbed their new star the “Missouri Express” and the “Fulton Flash.”58
The loss to Stephens was a psychological blow to Walsh. Although she had been beaten in a few races before, Walsh had been the best woman sprinter in the country for several years. Stephens was nearly six inches taller and simply faster than Walsh, and there was nothing Walsh could do about it. A sprinter’s psyche is fragile. Sports like sprinting or jumping rely on sheer physical gifts; as much as one might train, there is a limit to how fast one can run or how high one can jump. Sprinters can work on their starts and technique, but ultimately speed depends on genetics. Distance runners can put in more road work, discus throwers can lift weights and improve technique, and athletes in team sports can rely on teammates to improve chances of winning. Sprinters are alone in their pursuit of the finish line. There is no strategy in a race that is finished in seconds, so extraneous factors assume greater importance.
Before the institution of photo finishes and electronic timing, competitors were encouraged to wear a white top to stand out at the finish line. Before a race, competitors often study the starter to detect a pattern in his or her cadence. Some athletes have a quicker reaction time, which is a big advantage in the dashes. West German Armin Hari, who won the 100 meters at the 1960 Rome Olympics, was known as the “Thief of Starts.”
Sprinters want to remain cool and calm before the start, and combine explosion off the start and a relaxed, steady acceleration. The speediest runners are able to combine supreme effort with a governor on their emotions. Seeing a rival in front can discombobulate the most veteran runner. Walsh worked as hard as anyone to maximize her sprinting talent, and she had built a life of fame and some financial reward around her unparalleled speed. There were no longer distances on the women’s Olympic program at the time, so the stakes for Walsh the sprinter were high. Stephens was a problem.
A few months later, Walsh was scheduled for a rematch against Stephens at an AAU meet in St. Louis, but Walsh declined to run, claiming that the meet conflicted with her exams at Notre Dame Academy, which she was supposed to finish in June.59 “I can beat her any time I try,” Walsh boasted.60 Upon hearing that, Stephens challenged, “Swell! Tell Miss Walsh I shall be delighted to race her any time—anywhere—even over plowed ground.” Years later, Stephens said that Walsh “avoided racing me after that, but she couldn’t duck out of the [1936] Olympics. I blew her doors off there, too.”61
The Missouri press howled that Walsh was obligated to race Stephens again. The Jefferson City Daily Capital News wrote, “She says she is going to her native heath, Poland, to train girls in athletics. All right, if Stella has cold feet and refuses to meet our Helen, we’ll just pin the muslin on the Missouri girl and let it go at that.”62 Dr. Noram Bothert, head of the St. Louis Girls Athletic Club, asked the AAU to suspend Walsh. Walsh was incensed, reiterating that she had to go back to school. “But instead of turning these facts over to the public,” Walsh charged, “the St. Louis officials continued to advertise me for the meet until the last minute, when they gave out the information that I had ‘run out’ on them.”63
Even without Walsh to push her, Stephens beat Walsh’s world record in the 100 meters. That summer, Walsh returned to Poland on the Kościuszko, again vehemently denying that she was afraid to run against Stephens. They would meet again at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, under the curious gaze of Adolf Hitler.
5
Stella Walsh and Helen Stephens at the Nazi Olympics
[Stephens] could not have been more comfortable running around in Berlin, even if the Olympics had been held in the time of Frederick the Great: Without any doubt she would have been drafted into the grenadier’s regiment. Miss Stephens does not betray femininity. She has broad shoulders, fully masculine arm muscles and legs, and runs like men.
—Polish newspaper Kurjer Warszawski [Warsaw Courier], after Helen Stephens beat Stella Walsh in the 100 meters at the Berlin Olympics
In August 1935, Stella Walsh was in Warsaw for the Polonia World Olympics. The mood that summer in the Polish capital was gloomy. The Depression was grinding onward, and Marshal Piłsudski had succumbed to cancer in May, leaving the country without its revered helmsman at a most crucial time. Adolf Hitler was stirring up German nationalism and rebuilding the Wehr-macht. His long-term expansionist plans were directed eastward, against Poland and the Soviet Union. One ode to Piłsudski after his death recalled his role in the resurrection of Poland:
Out of the prison—grief of hopeless years,
Out of the bloody travail—pangs of war,
A nation to outsoar,
The proudest vaunting of an earlier age.1
The author could not have imagined that in four years his country would be crushed again in another world war.
Walsh reportedly set a new world record in the 100 meters at the Polonia Olympics, and that fall, in the Silesian town of Czeladź, she set another world record in the 250 meters, one of the peculiar distances that padded Walsh’s tally of record-setting marks. The number of Walsh’s world records is unverifiable. Some races were wind-aided, and timekeepers with stopwatches had to rely on visual starts and finishes. Meet organizers often claimed that world records had been set because it was good publicity. Furthermore, the 250 meters was one of the many world records that Walsh set in such unusual distances as 40, 75, and 80 meters (or yards). The IAAF did not sanction many of these meets or recognize these record times. Nonetheless, Walsh was in top form heading into the 1936 Olympics.
After the Czeladź meet, Walsh left for a tour of Japan. Her ship went through the Suez Canal, where she stopped to see the pyramids in Egypt. Walsh established another unofficial world record in the 200 meters in Osaka, and in Tokyo, she set a new mark in the 500 meters, another odd distance. Japanese sports fans remembered Walsh because of her friendly rivalry with Japanese sprinter Kinue Hitomi in the early 1930s. Walsh was highly complimentary of the warm reception: “I never heard them make a bad remark about the United States,” she said. “They were good friends. Large crowds, sometimes as many as 20,000 saw the meets—which is quite a lot for a women’s meet. I was the only foreigner there.”2 The Plain Dealer kept tabs on “Stella the Traveler”: “All races, including the yellow,” as the newspaper put it about her races in the Far East, “are the same to Stella Walsh, who is currently showing a lot of heels to the speediest gal sprinters over in Japan.”3
This was a delicate time for Japan’s relations with the United States. Japan was bent on becoming the preeminent power in the Far East. Japan had joined the Western powers in World War I, hoping to take German possessions in the Shantung Peninsula and islands in the we
stern Pacific. At the Paris Peace Conference after the war, Japanese emissaries asked the Western powers to agree to a resolution declaring the Japanese the racial equal of Caucasians. Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau ignored them. The Japanese leaders also thought it was an affront when the Western powers, at several postwar disarmament conferences, would not agree to parity in naval tonnage. In the 1930s, militarists gradually took over the Japanese government.
By 1931, the Japanese Army was in Manchuria and poised to impose its will on the rest of China, threatening U.S. interests in the Far East. In 1934, Babe Ruth, the New York Yankees’ famed “Sultan of Swat,” led an All-Star team to Japan. Fellow Yankee great Lou Gehrig went along. American officials hoped that the “diamond diplomats” would marginalize the militarists and embolden the doves in the Japanese government. The American press commented on Japan’s reverence for the Babe:
In the newsreels we see him walking the narrow streets of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagasaki, and as he walks, round-headed children swarm in his wake. Their elders line the curbs with shining eyes. . . . Ruth’s fame has spread, undoubtedly, to every little rice village in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Japanese fans’ rousing reception for the American stars prompted tour manager Connie Mack to exaggerate the political importance of Ruth’s appearances:
[This is] one of the greatest peace measures in the history of nations. . . . The parley on the naval treaty was on, with America blocking Japan’s demand for parity. There was strong anti-American feeling throughout Japan over this country’s stand. Things didn’t look good at all. And then Babe Ruth smacked a home run, and all the ill feeling and underground war sentiment vanished just like that.4
That was not quite so. The home runs Ruth hit on the tour and Walsh’s appearances on the track did little to change the course of Japanese imperial policy. Extreme anti-Western attitudes were still rampant in the country, as was evident when a radical Japanese nationalist knifed the baseball tour organizer and well-known publisher Matsutaro Shoriki. In 1937 Japan launched a full-fledged attack on China, and four years later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
In late 1935, Walsh returned to New York on the Piłsudski. She bowed out of the AAU Indoor Championships, scheduled for February 1936. “I am not taking part in indoor meets because of the Olympics,” she explained. “There is a chance I might ‘go stale.’ I don’t want to train too early.” She also said that she was studying for another round of final exams at Notre Dame and declared that this was her last year of competition.5 It was not the first or last time Walsh would announce her retirement, only to renege again and again.
Walsh did not show up to race Stephens at another AAU meet in Chicago in March 1936. “I’ll meet her in the Olympics,” she told the Plain Dealer.6 For some reason, Walsh was in Chicago at the time and personally congratulated Stephens on her new 50-meter world record of 6.6. A Polish American Review photo shows Stephens receiving an award from meet officials. A dour Walsh is in the background, looking smart in a white skirt, dark blazer, and feather hat, but obviously indifferent to the proceedings. The tagline reads, “Stella Walsh, foremost sprint star of the world.”7 Walsh claimed that Käthe Krauss and another German sprinter—Marie Dollinger—would give her more trouble than Stephens in Berlin, but after Stephens’s decisive defeat of Walsh in 1935, Walsh knew in the back of her mind that she could not beat the big Missourian.
There was a chance Walsh and Stephens would not meet in Berlin, as a boycott of the Olympics loomed. Hitler’s bellicosity increased in the mid-1930s, and the tyrannical character of the Third Reich was laid bare. In March 1935, Hitler announced that Germany was rebuilding its army and air force in contravention of the Versailles Treaty. In September, the Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws, which made marriage between Aryan Germans and Jews illegal, and formalized legal discrimination. Political opponents were being thrown into concentration camps, and the overt persecution of Jews increased.
Walsh personally witnessed the Nazi campaign against the Jews at track meets in Germany. In 1935, she told the New York Times that Germany’s treatment of Jews was “very bad indeed.” At a dual meet between the Polish and German national teams in Dresden in August, she said that one of her Jewish teammates, hurdler Mary Friewald, had endured humiliating denunciations from German athletes and fans. “Like every other athlete,” Walsh said, “I’d hate to have anything prevent the Olympic Games. I hope things can be straightened out. Yes, there are anti-Jewish signs up. The Jews have to compete against themselves in their own clubs.”8
Fascist understanding of the value of sport, first championed by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, was rooted in nineteenth-century European sporting culture. Fascist images of a virile, brave, and disciplined male paralleled the aims of the YMCA’s “muscular Christianity” and the lessons learned through German Turnvater Jahn’s gymnastic drill. The Olympic movement had deviated from Coubertin’s vision of individuals competing in a peaceful, cosmopolitan atmosphere to a test of national strength. Italian Fascists and German Nazis took the medal count as an objective measure of where the nation stood in the racial hierarchy. Fascist sport was largely a masculine endeavor. If women were allowed to do sport at all, it was to prepare them to bear healthy, strong children to replenish the racial stock.
The ideal of the blonde, blue-eyed, Spartan-like German athlete fit into the party’s mythology connecting Greece and the Aryan race. The Nazis accused the Jews of injecting “sensationalism” into sport and bringing foreign sports to Germany solely for profit. After initial indifference to sport, the Nazis began to promote physical exercise as a means to perfect the body and a way to strengthen the vigor of the nation.
In 1931, the IOC awarded Berlin the 1936 Olympics. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the IOC set a precedent by allowing the Olympics to stay in Berlin; the IOC has since awarded the Games to other such undemocratic regimes as Moscow in 1980 and Beijing in 2008. At first, the Nazis had little interest in the Olympics, but propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels realized that Germany had much to gain by putting on a successful show. Los Angeles had commercialized the 1932 Olympics by engaging the local business community and the Hollywood film industry. The Nazis did not put on the Olympics for economic gain, but to rally the German people behind the regime, confirm Nazi ideology about the superiority of the Aryan race, and assure the rest of the world that Germany was a peaceful country. The Nazis inaugurated the first “torch relay” from Athens through the Balkans to Berlin to connect the Third Reich to the ancient Olympics. The neo-classical architecture of the Berlin Olympic Stadium further connected the Germans to the Greeks.
The Olympics would also serve Hitler’s short-term foreign policy goal of assuring the world that Germany was a “normal” state and that he had no aggressive designs on his neighbors. Of course, Walsh’s homeland was one of Hitler’s targets. The Wehrmacht was not yet ready for a major war, so Hitler had to bide his time, especially after he had gambled by remilitarizing the Rhineland in March 1936. If the French and British had acted to oust the Germans from the Rhineland, Hitler had planned to retreat.
Shortly after the Nazis came to power in early 1933, they imposed a boycott on Jewish businesses. Theodor Lewald, head of the German Olympic Committee, was sacked because he was half Jewish. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws codified discrimination against German Jews. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the American Federation of Labor declared in favor of a boycott. When judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney, head of the AAU and a member of the American Olympic Committee (AOC), argued against sending a U.S. team to Berlin, the boycott movement gained momentum.9
AOC president Avery Brundage was adamantly opposed to the boycott, pointing out that during a fact-finding tour of Germany he had found nothing amiss in the state of German athletics. German handlers carefully managed the tour, designated which sports facilities the delegation could visit, and convinced Brundage that the
German government was not discriminating against Jewish athletes. He declared that the Berlin Games would go on as planned. Critics of the AOC pointed to a pamphlet that the Nazi Party had sent to German sports organizations about the Berlin Olympics, warning that we “can see no positive value in permitting dirty Jews and Negroes to travel through our country and compete in athletics with our best.” Confronted with evidence that the Nazi regime was indeed discriminating against Jews, athletes or not, Brundage charged that there was a “Jewish–Communist conspiracy” to keep the United States out of the Olympics.10 He warned about the disproportionate influence of Jews in both countries and the possible need for anti-Jewish laws in the United States:
As it was in Germany, a great deal of the German nation was led by the Jews and not by the Germans themselves. Even in the U.S.A. the day may come when you will have to stop the activities of the Jews. They are intelligent and unscrupulous . . . they must be kept within certain limits.11
Most American Olympians were opposed to the boycott. Eleanor Holm, the 1932 gold medalist in the 100-meter backstroke, declared, “The United States should not withdraw from the 1936 Olympics. Why should I, or any other athlete, be penalized for the action of Joe Zilch, or anybody else named Hitler who has nothing whatsoever to do with us?”12 Helen Stephens received many letters imploring her to sit out the Berlin Games. She recalled AOC officials saying, “We don’t want to get involved.” Stephens wanted to run in Berlin, and polls showed that a clear majority of Americans opposed a boycott.13
A number of American athletes of Jewish heritage decided against going to Berlin, including Lillian Copeland, the U.S. gold medalist in the discus at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Copeland was the daughter of a Polish Jew from Grodno. She was still a world-class discus thrower in 1936, having won several U.S. national championships in the early 1930s. As one of the two women on the American team at the 1935 World Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv, Copeland won the discus, shot put, and javelin. The German team of 184 Jewish athletes was by far the largest at Tel Aviv, and Copeland heard from them firsthand about the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies. Copeland accused Brundage of “intentionally concealing the truth” about the nature of Hitler’s regime. Although Copeland did not go to the Berlin Olympics, she was not an outspoken advocate for the boycott. Evelyn Furtsch, Copeland’s teammate at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, went public in her support of it.14
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 11