Circa 1935
DUKE KAHANAMOKU’S SURFBOARD
When Captain James Cook and his crew floated into the Hawaiian islands in 1778, one of the many things that astonished the Englishmen was how the locals were “so perfectly masters of themselves in the water.”1 Big waves scared the Europeans; to the Hawaiians, they were playthings. Most of all, the Europeans were fascinated by seeing them surf.
Surfing was imbedded in every part of Hawaiian culture. There were rituals associated with building a surfboard, and a strict social order regulated who got to ride which waves. Royal boards were longer (12 to 14 feet) and made of olo wood.2 Surfing was also part of courtship. In a society where the mixing of the sexes on land was strictly regulated, sharing a wave was decidedly erotic. And it was fun. Whole communities would catch waves together, old and young, male and female. “The boldness and address, with which we saw them perform these difficult and dangerous maneuvers,” wrote Lieutenant James King, “was altogether astonishing, and is scarcely to be credited.”3
Cook’s crew were among the last Europeans to see surf culture in all its glory. When outsiders came to harvest Hawaii’s sandalwood and to plant rice and sugarcane, they converted what had been a comfortable subsistence-plus economy into a wage-driven one. Hawaiians had less time to surf; they had schedules to keep. Christian missionaries, who began arriving in 1820, mildly discouraged the practice.4
The largest reason for surfing’s decline, however, was the decline of kapu, the traditional value system of which it was a part, as Hawaiian communities withered away from imported diseases. By 1898, the year Hawaii officially became a US territory, the population of the islands had dropped at least 80 percent from Cook’s time.5
But the sport never quite died, and in the early twentieth century a native Hawaiian named Duke Paoa Kahanamoku led its renaissance, becoming, in a sense, a surfing missionary. Born in 1890, Kahanamoku grew up on the beaches of Waikiki and at an early age was recognized as the most gifted waterman around, skilled at swimming, surfing, and paddling. As a teenager, he and some friends started the first surf club, Hui Nalu, or Club of the Waves,6 which is credited as an important influence in reviving the sport. Kahanamoku was the acknowledged leader, which is why he is often referred to as the father of surfing.
In 1911 Hawaii held its first organized swim meet. Kahanamoku not only won the 100-yard race, but broke the world record by 4.6 seconds.7 He broke two other records in the same meet.8 The Amateur Athletic Union, which governed swimming and selected athletes for the Olympics, refused to sanction the records, finding the times literally unbelievable. But it was enough to get Kahanamoku invited to the Olympic trials.
On arriving in California, he gave a number of surfing demonstrations. Making his way cross-country, he easily qualified for the Olympics; he also benefited from coaching that improved his technique at diving and turning, areas the open-water swimmer needed to master.9 He did so, winning the 100-meter freestyle in Stockholm, and a silver medal as part of the 4 x 200-meter freestyle relay. Back in the United States, he gave swimming and surfing demonstrations on both coasts, before returning to acclaim in Hawaii.
Invited to Australia and New Zealand in 1915, he performed in dozens of swimming exhibitions. Near the end of his stay he crafted a nine-foot board. Then he took to the waves at Sydney’s Freshwater Beach, showing hundreds of screaming spectators what surfing was all about. Once he came in while standing on his head; another time with a 14-year-old girl on his shoulders.10 The Aussies loved it.
Kahanamoku returned to Hawaii, which was beginning to build a surfing economy. He made a living teaching the sport, including to a “frightfully keen” Prince of Wales.11 At the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Kahanamoku took two more golds, and then a silver in Paris in 1924 at age 34, just behind “Tarzan” Johnny Weissmuller. Kahanamoku remains the oldest man ever to win an Olympic swimming medal.
In the 1920s he became involved with the Hollywood in-crowd, befriending the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, and John Wayne. He appeared in some 30 silent movies, albeit in typecast roles such as an American Indian chief, Hindu priest, or Turkish warrior.12 At the same time, Kahanamoku used his popularity to promote surfing, an effort that he bolstered in the best possible way in 1925, when he rescued eight people from a capsized fishing boat.13
Returning to Hawaii in 1930, he became the sheriff of Honolulu and taught and surfed as much as he could. The photo on the previous page dates from the 1930s; he stands in front of Waikiki beach, where he had learned to surf and swim as a boy, and Diamond Head can be seen in the background. Shortly after Hawaii became a state in 1959, Kahanamoku was named its “Ambassador of Aloha”14—the perfect title for this gentle man with the bright smile and magnificent physique.
Kahanamoku was never rich, and he sometimes struggled financially. Unlike many other athletes, though, he was appreciated during his life and has never been forgotten. In 1990 a statue of Duke Kahanamoku in his prime, standing in front of a surfboard, was unveiled on Kuhio Beach in Waikiki. Four years later, the Sydney waterfront did the same. In 1999 Surfer magazine named him the “Surfer of the Century.” And in August 2015, Google designed one of its doodles in honor of the modern father of surfing. He is a member of the swimming, surfing, and US Olympic halls of fame.15
Duke Kahanamoku’s is a unique set of accomplishments. He was world class in one sport (swimming) and became the face of another (surfing), all while negotiating two cultures. He surfed into his sixties and had the satisfaction of seeing the sport he loved fill the beaches of Waikiki again. When he died in 1968, 15,000 admirers lined the beach as his remains were given to the ocean.16
1936
JESSE OWENS’S BATON FROM THE 4 X 100-METER RELAY
T
he story is familiar. Jesse Owens faced down a hostile Germany, winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. In so doing, he shocked the Nazis and humiliated Hitler, who refused to shake his hand and stormed out of the stadium in anger. Owens had been snubbed, but in the process, this great African American athlete gave the lie to the idea of Aryan superiority.1
It’s a great story, and there’s even a bit of truth to it. But it is best seen as a myth—that is, a tale that speaks to a society’s sense of itself. The Owens saga is more complex and more interesting than that simplistic morality tale.
About 5 foot 10 and 160 pounds, Owens was not a big man, but he was perfectly proportioned. Well coached since high school, his form was exquisite in its economy, with no wasted motion. Even at peak speed, his head barely moved, his upper body stayed still, and his feet hit the cinders with unfathomable lightness. Owens had the ability to accelerate smoothly, late in a race, into a gear unavailable to lesser mortals. Going into the Berlin Games, the 22-year-old from Ohio State was considered one of the country’s finest athletes.
So let’s dispose of myth number 1, that his performance shocked the Nazis. Not so. From 1934 on, the only people who had seriously challenged Owens were fellow Alabama-born African Americans Ralph Metcalfe and Eulace Peacock; no one else was in the same zip code. Metcalfe finished second to Owens in the 100 meters at the Games. Peacock did not compete. After beating Owens five times in a row in 1935–1936, he injured his hamstring and did not make the team.
In Berlin, Owens tied one world record (in the 100 meters); set one Olympic record (in the 200 meters);2 and was part of the world-record 4 x 100-meter relay. Then there was the thrilling long-jump duel with one of Hitler’s favorite athletes, Luz Long. When Long jumped a personal best, Owens warmly congratulated him, then jumped just a little farther to win. Long was equally sportsmanlike, rushing over to embrace him. There is a lovely picture of the two of them shortly after the competition, lying on their stomachs, obviously comfortable in each other’s company.3
Great as Owens’s Olympic performance was, it was not his best. That had taken place some 15 months before, at the 1935 Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor. Competing for Ohio State, Owens broke three world records (in the long jump, the 220-yard hurdles, and the 220-yard dash) and tied a fourth (in the 100-yard dash). No one had ever before broken two world records in a day; Owens did all this in less than an hour.4 So, no, Owens shocked no one in Berlin. Rather, he affirmed his own brilliance.
That brings us to myth number 2: he performed in a hostile environment. Owens did have reason to be concerned about his reception. The run-up to the Olympics had been tempestuous. When Berlin was awarded the Games in 1931, the Nazis were not yet in power. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, a number of organizations,5 including a significant minority of the black press,6 argued that the United States should boycott the games if Germany did not treat its Jewish athletes fairly. The Amateur Athletic Union agreed, and since it was the AAU that certified US athletes, this was serious.
The head of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, traveled to Germany in 1934 to assess the situation, and Nazi leaders managed to say just enough of the right things to win his support. Not that Brundage needed much persuading; he suggested privately that the boycott threat was just a matter of Jews being noisy and quite possibly unpatriotic.7 Eventually, the AAU acquiesced.8
Still, Owens was aware of Germany’s toxic racial environment. In the weeks prior to the Games, Nazi Party newspapers had taken to picturing him next to an ape. As he prepared himself for his first heat in the 100 meters, his coach advised him, “Don’t let anything from the stands upset you. Ignore the insults and you’ll be all right.”9
When he peeled down to his shorts and singlet, the crowd did begin to stir—not in abuse, but in a spontaneous roar: “Jess-say! O-wenz! Jess-say! O-wenz!” From that beginning to the end of the Games, he was showered with Teutonic affection. Other African American athletes were also pleasantly surprised. “They idolized us,” 400-meter gold medalist Archie Williams10 said of the German fans. “They wanted to take us to their house to meet their family.”11 Jimmy LuValle, who won bronze in the 400 meters,12 agreed: “The German people were as nice as they could be.”13
Myth number 3: Hitler was so enraged by Owens’s performance that he stormed out of the stadium rather than shake his hand.
This just didn’t happen. Here is the chronology of events.
Germany got off to a great start. On the first day of the Games, Tillie Fleischer won the country’s first-ever women’s gold medal in a field event (in the javelin), and Hans Woellke won the first-ever men’s gold (in the shotput). Three Finns swept the 10,000 meters. In each case, Hitler greeted the victors cordially, shaking their hands. The final event was the high jump. Two African Americans took the top spots—Cornelius Johnson, who had not lost a competition since 1932, and Dave Albritton, Owens’s fellow Buckeye. Hitler left the stadium shortly before the medal ceremony. No insult intended, German officials asserted. The great man just wanted to beat the traffic. Well, maybe. But it is hardly a stretch to suspect other reasons played a role.
At any rate, the omission was noticed, and the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was not pleased. He told Hitler to greet all winners, or none. The Fuhrer agreed on the latter—except for Germans, whom he would congratulate privately. And in fact, Hitler did not shake anyone’s hands in public after that conversation.
On the second day of the Games, Owens won the 100 meters, tying the world record (10.3 seconds) despite bad weather and a chewed-up inside lane. “No one ever ran a more perfect race,” the New York Times reported.14 The crowd roared its approval. Metcalfe was a tenth of a second behind. The closest quasi-Aryan, Martinus Osendarp of the Netherlands, took third.15 Owens made a short and graceful speech, then took the podium, saluting smartly during the US national anthem. Hitler made no effort to shake his hand, creating a stir back in the United States.
But Hitler shook no one’s hand that day (or any subsequent day), not even that of Karl Hein, the German who won the hammer throw. And he did not storm out of the stadium. For years afterward, Owens shrugged off the alleged snub. In the 1964 documentary Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin, he pointed out that “the real snub” was to Johnson, the high-jumper, the day before.
No matter; the idea that Hitler had gone out of his way to insult Owens took hold. When Owens returned to a divided and still-battered West Berlin in 1951, Mayor Walter Schreiber told him, “Hitler wouldn’t shake your hand; I give you both hands.” Once again, the crowd roared.
While the facts say Owens was not directly snubbed, that is not to say that Hitler was being polite, only politic. “The Americans ought to be ashamed of themselves for letting their medals be won by Negroes,” he told a Nazi Youth leader some days later. “I myself would never shake hands with one of them.”16
Myth number 4: the Nazis were humiliated because their theories of Aryan supremacy were so vividly debunked.
Not at all. While Nazi racial philosophies were vicious, they were also infinitely flexible; to believers, the results of the Berlin Olympics proved they were right. In 1932 Germany had won just 20 medals, 3 of them gold; in 1936, the country won 89 medals (33 gold), far ahead of the second-place United States. Nazi leaders could and did point to Germany’s success as a vindication of the ideals of the Third Reich.17
The United States outperformed Germany on the track (12 gold medals to Germany’s 3), in large part due to the excellence of its African American athletes.18 But this could be explained away. Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer, stated that the boss was “highly annoyed” by Owens’s success, but not surprised: “People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future Games.”19
To sum up: when Aryans do well, it’s because they are superior; when blacks do well, it’s because they are inferior.
Far from a humiliation, the Games were a triumph for the Nazis. Visitors came away with a sense that there was a true connection between Fuhrer and (non-Jewish) Volk. The New York Times observed a “deep-seated adoration of Hitler [that] gave all German athletes an inspirational lift that no other country could match.”20
As politics, sport, and spectacle, it worked, attracting a record number of countries (49) and spectators.21 The Berlin Games were the first to sponsor a torch relay from Olympia, the first to be reported on global radio, the first to be broadcast on television (in special screening venues),22 the first to feature photo-finish technology, and the first to use electric apparatus to record hits in fencing.
The Olympic Village, which housed 3,500 male athletes, was a marvel. The 140 buildings were laid out in the shape of Germany,23 and each residence was named after a German city. Art students contributed work that reflected the landscape or culture of that city.24 In addition to a sauna, cinema, post office, bank, and training facilities, the kitchens provided cuisine adapted to the different tastes of the competitors.25 The IOC was certainly impressed. In late 1938, Switzerland decided not to host the 1940 Winter Games. At that point, there was no longer any doubt about the nature of Nazism. Even so, as a replacement, the IOC chose . . . Germany.
Jesse Owens performed brilliantly in Berlin, but he did not smash or even weaken the notion of Aryan supremacy: People who believed in that idea before the Olympics believed in it after. Moreover, the way the Owens’s story is generally told, as the noble American triumphing over nasty Nazis, elides some uncomfortable truths.
It was not only Nazis who needed to learn (and didn’t) that racial superiority was a fallacy. Owens could live in the Olympic Village with other athletes; he could not live on campus at Ohio State, a ban confirmed by the Ohio Supreme Court in 1933.26 He could sit in any seat on a Berlin bus or train (except that he would have been smothered in love); he could not do that in his birthplace of Alabama.27
The “Legend of the Snub” has become so firmly established because it serves a variety of interests. For the West Germans, “I shake both your hands” was a way of separating postwar democratic Germany from the Third Reich. For the United States, it provided a comfortable way to affirm truth, justice, and the American way. For Olympic leaders, it allowed them to present the Games as a force for good, a highly debatable point.
Owens used this baton to win his fourth gold medal—the most ever in a single Games by a US track athlete at the time, and because of that, in a sense, the one that made him a legend.28 A hollow length that weighs next to nothing, the baton is signed by the four winning runners—Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, Foy Draper, and Frank Wykoff. But there is another story behind those signatures. Neither Owens nor Metcalfe had been scheduled to run the relay. Just a few hours before the competition began, the US coaches, Lawson Robertson and Dean Cromwell, ordered them to take the places of Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, who had been named to the relay team at the Trials and had been training for weeks with their teammates. The Germans, the coaches claimed, were hiding secret super-athletes.
This was, of course, ridiculous; world-class athletes cannot be stowed away. The suspicion, then and now, is that the US coaches were pressured not to allow Glickman and Stoller to compete because they were Jewish. That’s possible, but it’s hard to see how replacing two Jewish athletes with two African American ones placates Nazi sensibilities. Another possibility is that having decided to add Owens and Metcalfe, just in case, Cromwell expelled Glickman and Stoller in favor of his own runners from Southern Cal (Draper and Wykoff). At any rate, the four duly set a world record, 39.8, a time that would last for twenty years. Germany, of course, had no secret weapons in spikes; it finished third, 1.4 seconds behind.
There can be no definitive answer to why the coaches made this decision; what can be said is that it smelled, even at the time. Robertson would later apologize to Glickman and Stoller for what he called “a terrible injustice.”29
After the Games, Germany swapped Olympic flags for ones with swastikas. Anti-Jewish posters, graffiti, and harassment reemerged immediately. The Olympic Village became an infantry training center before World War II,30 a hospital during it, and a KGB interrogation center after. It is now a ghostly ruin, with the exception of Jesse Owens’s room, which has been restored.31
Almost three years to the day after the closing ceremonies, Hitler unleashed the war that would kill tens of millions of people, including dozens of Olympic athletes. Among them: Foy Draper, a bomber pilot lost over North Africa, and Luz Long, killed in action in Sicily.
1936
THE HUSKY CLIPPER
T
his is a simpler story from the Berlin Olympics. Call it the Miracle on Water. Or Hoosiers West.1 It’s that kind of story.
In 1936 an eight-man boat from the University of Washington, with a crew composed almost entirely of the sons of lumberjacks, miners, farmers, and laborers, dominated their archrivals at the University of California, went east and won the national championship, then triumphed at the Olympic trials. Then they got the bad news. If they couldn’t pay their own expenses, a team from the University of Pennsylvania would be happy to take their place in Berlin. Penn had no lumberjacks among its crew.
There was no way the boys from Washington could come up with anything near the $5,000 required. There were no rowing scholarships, and most of them worked tough jobs just to stay afloat. So the entire state rose to the challenge;2 newspapers publicized their plight and clubs and individuals all over raised the money in a couple of days.3
The boys repaid this generosity with style, setting a world record in their first 2,000-meter heat in Berlin. That got them noticed. But just as the United States owned the track in 1936 (see the 1936 entry on Jesse Owens), Germany owned the water, winning five races and coming in second in another. Hitler, who attended the finals along with top lieutenants Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels, was delighted. So were the 75,000 spectators, whose cries of “Deutschland, Deutschland,” called in the cadence of each German boat,4 must have been unnerving.
The 2,000-meter race was the last of the day. The Americans were not intimidated, but neither were they in the best of shape. Their stroke, Don Hume, had risen from his sick bed to race, and their number three, Gordon Adam, was also feeling weak. In addition, the Olympic authorities had put the slower qualifiers, including Germany, in the better lanes. The Americans were in the worst, farthest from the starting gun, and most vulnerable to the crosswinds. Then they got off to a bad start, losing half a length before they had taken a single stroke.5 “We didn’t start slow, we just didn’t start, period,” said crew member Joe Rantz.6
At 1,000 meters, the United States was in last place, five seconds behind.7 With 800 meters left, Hume gathered his strength “and by golly, away we went,” recalled coxswain Bob Moch.8 At 500 meters, the boat had moved into third; at 300 meters, it was a close second. At 100 meters, it had pulled even, and the eight-man crew took the tempo up to an unprecedented 44 strokes a minute.9 It was just enough. The United States finished about eight feet ahead of Italy, which beat Germany by even less.10 A single second separated the three.11 The crew was so exhausted it couldn’t muster the energy to follow Washington tradition and throw the cox overboard.12
This is the boat, the Husky Clipper, that the boys rowed to victory. It is 60 feet long, 2 feet wide, and less than half an inch thick, and weighs about 235 pounds. Designed by craftsman and rowing mystic George Pocock, it is made chiefly of western red cedar. Pocock would lather the underside with whale oil to reduce friction.
Today’s boats, by contrast, are composed of space-age composites that do not require the use of whale by-products, and the oars weigh a third as much as in 1936. But though the technology of rowing has changed, the place of the Husky Clipper in Washington’s history has not. The shell hangs from the ceiling of the university’s boathouse; it is tradition for each new cohort of rowers to be told the story of 1936 as they stand under it. And to this day, Husky rowers use white blades—just as the boys in the boat did.13
DUKE KAHANAMOKU’S SURFBOARD
When Captain James Cook and his crew floated into the Hawaiian islands in 1778, one of the many things that astonished the Englishmen was how the locals were “so perfectly masters of themselves in the water.”1 Big waves scared the Europeans; to the Hawaiians, they were playthings. Most of all, the Europeans were fascinated by seeing them surf.
Surfing was imbedded in every part of Hawaiian culture. There were rituals associated with building a surfboard, and a strict social order regulated who got to ride which waves. Royal boards were longer (12 to 14 feet) and made of olo wood.2 Surfing was also part of courtship. In a society where the mixing of the sexes on land was strictly regulated, sharing a wave was decidedly erotic. And it was fun. Whole communities would catch waves together, old and young, male and female. “The boldness and address, with which we saw them perform these difficult and dangerous maneuvers,” wrote Lieutenant James King, “was altogether astonishing, and is scarcely to be credited.”3
Cook’s crew were among the last Europeans to see surf culture in all its glory. When outsiders came to harvest Hawaii’s sandalwood and to plant rice and sugarcane, they converted what had been a comfortable subsistence-plus economy into a wage-driven one. Hawaiians had less time to surf; they had schedules to keep. Christian missionaries, who began arriving in 1820, mildly discouraged the practice.4
The largest reason for surfing’s decline, however, was the decline of kapu, the traditional value system of which it was a part, as Hawaiian communities withered away from imported diseases. By 1898, the year Hawaii officially became a US territory, the population of the islands had dropped at least 80 percent from Cook’s time.5
But the sport never quite died, and in the early twentieth century a native Hawaiian named Duke Paoa Kahanamoku led its renaissance, becoming, in a sense, a surfing missionary. Born in 1890, Kahanamoku grew up on the beaches of Waikiki and at an early age was recognized as the most gifted waterman around, skilled at swimming, surfing, and paddling. As a teenager, he and some friends started the first surf club, Hui Nalu, or Club of the Waves,6 which is credited as an important influence in reviving the sport. Kahanamoku was the acknowledged leader, which is why he is often referred to as the father of surfing.
In 1911 Hawaii held its first organized swim meet. Kahanamoku not only won the 100-yard race, but broke the world record by 4.6 seconds.7 He broke two other records in the same meet.8 The Amateur Athletic Union, which governed swimming and selected athletes for the Olympics, refused to sanction the records, finding the times literally unbelievable. But it was enough to get Kahanamoku invited to the Olympic trials.
On arriving in California, he gave a number of surfing demonstrations. Making his way cross-country, he easily qualified for the Olympics; he also benefited from coaching that improved his technique at diving and turning, areas the open-water swimmer needed to master.9 He did so, winning the 100-meter freestyle in Stockholm, and a silver medal as part of the 4 x 200-meter freestyle relay. Back in the United States, he gave swimming and surfing demonstrations on both coasts, before returning to acclaim in Hawaii.
Invited to Australia and New Zealand in 1915, he performed in dozens of swimming exhibitions. Near the end of his stay he crafted a nine-foot board. Then he took to the waves at Sydney’s Freshwater Beach, showing hundreds of screaming spectators what surfing was all about. Once he came in while standing on his head; another time with a 14-year-old girl on his shoulders.10 The Aussies loved it.
Kahanamoku returned to Hawaii, which was beginning to build a surfing economy. He made a living teaching the sport, including to a “frightfully keen” Prince of Wales.11 At the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Kahanamoku took two more golds, and then a silver in Paris in 1924 at age 34, just behind “Tarzan” Johnny Weissmuller. Kahanamoku remains the oldest man ever to win an Olympic swimming medal.
In the 1920s he became involved with the Hollywood in-crowd, befriending the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, and John Wayne. He appeared in some 30 silent movies, albeit in typecast roles such as an American Indian chief, Hindu priest, or Turkish warrior.12 At the same time, Kahanamoku used his popularity to promote surfing, an effort that he bolstered in the best possible way in 1925, when he rescued eight people from a capsized fishing boat.13
Returning to Hawaii in 1930, he became the sheriff of Honolulu and taught and surfed as much as he could. The photo on the previous page dates from the 1930s; he stands in front of Waikiki beach, where he had learned to surf and swim as a boy, and Diamond Head can be seen in the background. Shortly after Hawaii became a state in 1959, Kahanamoku was named its “Ambassador of Aloha”14—the perfect title for this gentle man with the bright smile and magnificent physique.
Kahanamoku was never rich, and he sometimes struggled financially. Unlike many other athletes, though, he was appreciated during his life and has never been forgotten. In 1990 a statue of Duke Kahanamoku in his prime, standing in front of a surfboard, was unveiled on Kuhio Beach in Waikiki. Four years later, the Sydney waterfront did the same. In 1999 Surfer magazine named him the “Surfer of the Century.” And in August 2015, Google designed one of its doodles in honor of the modern father of surfing. He is a member of the swimming, surfing, and US Olympic halls of fame.15
Duke Kahanamoku’s is a unique set of accomplishments. He was world class in one sport (swimming) and became the face of another (surfing), all while negotiating two cultures. He surfed into his sixties and had the satisfaction of seeing the sport he loved fill the beaches of Waikiki again. When he died in 1968, 15,000 admirers lined the beach as his remains were given to the ocean.16
1936
JESSE OWENS’S BATON FROM THE 4 X 100-METER RELAY
T
he story is familiar. Jesse Owens faced down a hostile Germany, winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. In so doing, he shocked the Nazis and humiliated Hitler, who refused to shake his hand and stormed out of the stadium in anger. Owens had been snubbed, but in the process, this great African American athlete gave the lie to the idea of Aryan superiority.1
It’s a great story, and there’s even a bit of truth to it. But it is best seen as a myth—that is, a tale that speaks to a society’s sense of itself. The Owens saga is more complex and more interesting than that simplistic morality tale.
About 5 foot 10 and 160 pounds, Owens was not a big man, but he was perfectly proportioned. Well coached since high school, his form was exquisite in its economy, with no wasted motion. Even at peak speed, his head barely moved, his upper body stayed still, and his feet hit the cinders with unfathomable lightness. Owens had the ability to accelerate smoothly, late in a race, into a gear unavailable to lesser mortals. Going into the Berlin Games, the 22-year-old from Ohio State was considered one of the country’s finest athletes.
So let’s dispose of myth number 1, that his performance shocked the Nazis. Not so. From 1934 on, the only people who had seriously challenged Owens were fellow Alabama-born African Americans Ralph Metcalfe and Eulace Peacock; no one else was in the same zip code. Metcalfe finished second to Owens in the 100 meters at the Games. Peacock did not compete. After beating Owens five times in a row in 1935–1936, he injured his hamstring and did not make the team.
In Berlin, Owens tied one world record (in the 100 meters); set one Olympic record (in the 200 meters);2 and was part of the world-record 4 x 100-meter relay. Then there was the thrilling long-jump duel with one of Hitler’s favorite athletes, Luz Long. When Long jumped a personal best, Owens warmly congratulated him, then jumped just a little farther to win. Long was equally sportsmanlike, rushing over to embrace him. There is a lovely picture of the two of them shortly after the competition, lying on their stomachs, obviously comfortable in each other’s company.3
Great as Owens’s Olympic performance was, it was not his best. That had taken place some 15 months before, at the 1935 Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor. Competing for Ohio State, Owens broke three world records (in the long jump, the 220-yard hurdles, and the 220-yard dash) and tied a fourth (in the 100-yard dash). No one had ever before broken two world records in a day; Owens did all this in less than an hour.4 So, no, Owens shocked no one in Berlin. Rather, he affirmed his own brilliance.
That brings us to myth number 2: he performed in a hostile environment. Owens did have reason to be concerned about his reception. The run-up to the Olympics had been tempestuous. When Berlin was awarded the Games in 1931, the Nazis were not yet in power. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, a number of organizations,5 including a significant minority of the black press,6 argued that the United States should boycott the games if Germany did not treat its Jewish athletes fairly. The Amateur Athletic Union agreed, and since it was the AAU that certified US athletes, this was serious.
The head of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, traveled to Germany in 1934 to assess the situation, and Nazi leaders managed to say just enough of the right things to win his support. Not that Brundage needed much persuading; he suggested privately that the boycott threat was just a matter of Jews being noisy and quite possibly unpatriotic.7 Eventually, the AAU acquiesced.8
Still, Owens was aware of Germany’s toxic racial environment. In the weeks prior to the Games, Nazi Party newspapers had taken to picturing him next to an ape. As he prepared himself for his first heat in the 100 meters, his coach advised him, “Don’t let anything from the stands upset you. Ignore the insults and you’ll be all right.”9
When he peeled down to his shorts and singlet, the crowd did begin to stir—not in abuse, but in a spontaneous roar: “Jess-say! O-wenz! Jess-say! O-wenz!” From that beginning to the end of the Games, he was showered with Teutonic affection. Other African American athletes were also pleasantly surprised. “They idolized us,” 400-meter gold medalist Archie Williams10 said of the German fans. “They wanted to take us to their house to meet their family.”11 Jimmy LuValle, who won bronze in the 400 meters,12 agreed: “The German people were as nice as they could be.”13
Myth number 3: Hitler was so enraged by Owens’s performance that he stormed out of the stadium rather than shake his hand.
This just didn’t happen. Here is the chronology of events.
Germany got off to a great start. On the first day of the Games, Tillie Fleischer won the country’s first-ever women’s gold medal in a field event (in the javelin), and Hans Woellke won the first-ever men’s gold (in the shotput). Three Finns swept the 10,000 meters. In each case, Hitler greeted the victors cordially, shaking their hands. The final event was the high jump. Two African Americans took the top spots—Cornelius Johnson, who had not lost a competition since 1932, and Dave Albritton, Owens’s fellow Buckeye. Hitler left the stadium shortly before the medal ceremony. No insult intended, German officials asserted. The great man just wanted to beat the traffic. Well, maybe. But it is hardly a stretch to suspect other reasons played a role.
At any rate, the omission was noticed, and the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was not pleased. He told Hitler to greet all winners, or none. The Fuhrer agreed on the latter—except for Germans, whom he would congratulate privately. And in fact, Hitler did not shake anyone’s hands in public after that conversation.
On the second day of the Games, Owens won the 100 meters, tying the world record (10.3 seconds) despite bad weather and a chewed-up inside lane. “No one ever ran a more perfect race,” the New York Times reported.14 The crowd roared its approval. Metcalfe was a tenth of a second behind. The closest quasi-Aryan, Martinus Osendarp of the Netherlands, took third.15 Owens made a short and graceful speech, then took the podium, saluting smartly during the US national anthem. Hitler made no effort to shake his hand, creating a stir back in the United States.
But Hitler shook no one’s hand that day (or any subsequent day), not even that of Karl Hein, the German who won the hammer throw. And he did not storm out of the stadium. For years afterward, Owens shrugged off the alleged snub. In the 1964 documentary Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin, he pointed out that “the real snub” was to Johnson, the high-jumper, the day before.
No matter; the idea that Hitler had gone out of his way to insult Owens took hold. When Owens returned to a divided and still-battered West Berlin in 1951, Mayor Walter Schreiber told him, “Hitler wouldn’t shake your hand; I give you both hands.” Once again, the crowd roared.
While the facts say Owens was not directly snubbed, that is not to say that Hitler was being polite, only politic. “The Americans ought to be ashamed of themselves for letting their medals be won by Negroes,” he told a Nazi Youth leader some days later. “I myself would never shake hands with one of them.”16
Myth number 4: the Nazis were humiliated because their theories of Aryan supremacy were so vividly debunked.
Not at all. While Nazi racial philosophies were vicious, they were also infinitely flexible; to believers, the results of the Berlin Olympics proved they were right. In 1932 Germany had won just 20 medals, 3 of them gold; in 1936, the country won 89 medals (33 gold), far ahead of the second-place United States. Nazi leaders could and did point to Germany’s success as a vindication of the ideals of the Third Reich.17
The United States outperformed Germany on the track (12 gold medals to Germany’s 3), in large part due to the excellence of its African American athletes.18 But this could be explained away. Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer, stated that the boss was “highly annoyed” by Owens’s success, but not surprised: “People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future Games.”19
To sum up: when Aryans do well, it’s because they are superior; when blacks do well, it’s because they are inferior.
Far from a humiliation, the Games were a triumph for the Nazis. Visitors came away with a sense that there was a true connection between Fuhrer and (non-Jewish) Volk. The New York Times observed a “deep-seated adoration of Hitler [that] gave all German athletes an inspirational lift that no other country could match.”20
As politics, sport, and spectacle, it worked, attracting a record number of countries (49) and spectators.21 The Berlin Games were the first to sponsor a torch relay from Olympia, the first to be reported on global radio, the first to be broadcast on television (in special screening venues),22 the first to feature photo-finish technology, and the first to use electric apparatus to record hits in fencing.
The Olympic Village, which housed 3,500 male athletes, was a marvel. The 140 buildings were laid out in the shape of Germany,23 and each residence was named after a German city. Art students contributed work that reflected the landscape or culture of that city.24 In addition to a sauna, cinema, post office, bank, and training facilities, the kitchens provided cuisine adapted to the different tastes of the competitors.25 The IOC was certainly impressed. In late 1938, Switzerland decided not to host the 1940 Winter Games. At that point, there was no longer any doubt about the nature of Nazism. Even so, as a replacement, the IOC chose . . . Germany.
Jesse Owens performed brilliantly in Berlin, but he did not smash or even weaken the notion of Aryan supremacy: People who believed in that idea before the Olympics believed in it after. Moreover, the way the Owens’s story is generally told, as the noble American triumphing over nasty Nazis, elides some uncomfortable truths.
It was not only Nazis who needed to learn (and didn’t) that racial superiority was a fallacy. Owens could live in the Olympic Village with other athletes; he could not live on campus at Ohio State, a ban confirmed by the Ohio Supreme Court in 1933.26 He could sit in any seat on a Berlin bus or train (except that he would have been smothered in love); he could not do that in his birthplace of Alabama.27
The “Legend of the Snub” has become so firmly established because it serves a variety of interests. For the West Germans, “I shake both your hands” was a way of separating postwar democratic Germany from the Third Reich. For the United States, it provided a comfortable way to affirm truth, justice, and the American way. For Olympic leaders, it allowed them to present the Games as a force for good, a highly debatable point.
Owens used this baton to win his fourth gold medal—the most ever in a single Games by a US track athlete at the time, and because of that, in a sense, the one that made him a legend.28 A hollow length that weighs next to nothing, the baton is signed by the four winning runners—Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, Foy Draper, and Frank Wykoff. But there is another story behind those signatures. Neither Owens nor Metcalfe had been scheduled to run the relay. Just a few hours before the competition began, the US coaches, Lawson Robertson and Dean Cromwell, ordered them to take the places of Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, who had been named to the relay team at the Trials and had been training for weeks with their teammates. The Germans, the coaches claimed, were hiding secret super-athletes.
This was, of course, ridiculous; world-class athletes cannot be stowed away. The suspicion, then and now, is that the US coaches were pressured not to allow Glickman and Stoller to compete because they were Jewish. That’s possible, but it’s hard to see how replacing two Jewish athletes with two African American ones placates Nazi sensibilities. Another possibility is that having decided to add Owens and Metcalfe, just in case, Cromwell expelled Glickman and Stoller in favor of his own runners from Southern Cal (Draper and Wykoff). At any rate, the four duly set a world record, 39.8, a time that would last for twenty years. Germany, of course, had no secret weapons in spikes; it finished third, 1.4 seconds behind.
There can be no definitive answer to why the coaches made this decision; what can be said is that it smelled, even at the time. Robertson would later apologize to Glickman and Stoller for what he called “a terrible injustice.”29
After the Games, Germany swapped Olympic flags for ones with swastikas. Anti-Jewish posters, graffiti, and harassment reemerged immediately. The Olympic Village became an infantry training center before World War II,30 a hospital during it, and a KGB interrogation center after. It is now a ghostly ruin, with the exception of Jesse Owens’s room, which has been restored.31
Almost three years to the day after the closing ceremonies, Hitler unleashed the war that would kill tens of millions of people, including dozens of Olympic athletes. Among them: Foy Draper, a bomber pilot lost over North Africa, and Luz Long, killed in action in Sicily.
1936
THE HUSKY CLIPPER
T
his is a simpler story from the Berlin Olympics. Call it the Miracle on Water. Or Hoosiers West.1 It’s that kind of story.
In 1936 an eight-man boat from the University of Washington, with a crew composed almost entirely of the sons of lumberjacks, miners, farmers, and laborers, dominated their archrivals at the University of California, went east and won the national championship, then triumphed at the Olympic trials. Then they got the bad news. If they couldn’t pay their own expenses, a team from the University of Pennsylvania would be happy to take their place in Berlin. Penn had no lumberjacks among its crew.
There was no way the boys from Washington could come up with anything near the $5,000 required. There were no rowing scholarships, and most of them worked tough jobs just to stay afloat. So the entire state rose to the challenge;2 newspapers publicized their plight and clubs and individuals all over raised the money in a couple of days.3
The boys repaid this generosity with style, setting a world record in their first 2,000-meter heat in Berlin. That got them noticed. But just as the United States owned the track in 1936 (see the 1936 entry on Jesse Owens), Germany owned the water, winning five races and coming in second in another. Hitler, who attended the finals along with top lieutenants Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels, was delighted. So were the 75,000 spectators, whose cries of “Deutschland, Deutschland,” called in the cadence of each German boat,4 must have been unnerving.
The 2,000-meter race was the last of the day. The Americans were not intimidated, but neither were they in the best of shape. Their stroke, Don Hume, had risen from his sick bed to race, and their number three, Gordon Adam, was also feeling weak. In addition, the Olympic authorities had put the slower qualifiers, including Germany, in the better lanes. The Americans were in the worst, farthest from the starting gun, and most vulnerable to the crosswinds. Then they got off to a bad start, losing half a length before they had taken a single stroke.5 “We didn’t start slow, we just didn’t start, period,” said crew member Joe Rantz.6
At 1,000 meters, the United States was in last place, five seconds behind.7 With 800 meters left, Hume gathered his strength “and by golly, away we went,” recalled coxswain Bob Moch.8 At 500 meters, the boat had moved into third; at 300 meters, it was a close second. At 100 meters, it had pulled even, and the eight-man crew took the tempo up to an unprecedented 44 strokes a minute.9 It was just enough. The United States finished about eight feet ahead of Italy, which beat Germany by even less.10 A single second separated the three.11 The crew was so exhausted it couldn’t muster the energy to follow Washington tradition and throw the cox overboard.12
This is the boat, the Husky Clipper, that the boys rowed to victory. It is 60 feet long, 2 feet wide, and less than half an inch thick, and weighs about 235 pounds. Designed by craftsman and rowing mystic George Pocock, it is made chiefly of western red cedar. Pocock would lather the underside with whale oil to reduce friction.
Today’s boats, by contrast, are composed of space-age composites that do not require the use of whale by-products, and the oars weigh a third as much as in 1936. But though the technology of rowing has changed, the place of the Husky Clipper in Washington’s history has not. The shell hangs from the ceiling of the university’s boathouse; it is tradition for each new cohort of rowers to be told the story of 1936 as they stand under it. And to this day, Husky rowers use white blades—just as the boys in the boat did.13
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