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Episode: Hitler’s Olympics, Part 9: A Plague on Both Your Houses.
Author: Pushkin Industries
Duration: 00:44:52
Episode Shownotes
In the season finale, we turn back the clock four years, take a side trip to Alabama, meet an extraordinary man named Billy Garland, and ask: What is the right way to reconcile something pure with the messiness of the real world?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Full Transcript
00:00:04 Speaker_05
The thing I'm really, really interested in is the kind of way the case was received around the country and the world. That's where I want to get to. But starting with, so this train that's going to run right out there is coming from where?
00:00:19 Speaker_05
From Chattanooga. Right. Going where? To Nashville? Memphis. Going to Memphis. Yeah. I'm in a little town in northeast Alabama called Scottsboro, sitting in an old African Methodist Episcopal church built in 1878 by former slaves.
00:00:35 Speaker_05
The church is now a museum, and Ben Nadaf Haffrey and I are talking to the director, Tom Reedy, about what happened on the Chattanooga to Memphis train at the peak of the Great Depression.
00:00:48 Speaker_03
It's 1931, people are hoboing all over the country. And on the morning of March 25th, the nine defendants, along with two young ladies from Huntsville, along with dozens of others, we'll never know who else was on that train.
00:01:04 Speaker_03
Between here and Chattanooga, there was a altercation on the train. And at Stevenson, which is a town about 20 miles from here, Six white guys were thrown off the train by a group of African-Americans.
00:01:24 Speaker_03
This is probably one part of the story everybody agrees on, that six came off and these other guys stayed on. There's a fight. Yeah, there was a fight over space. This is Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.
00:01:37 Speaker_03
So the white guys that got off the train went back to the agent at the Stevenson Depot. and said, hey, we just got thrown off this train, which they were illegally on, right? They were unticketed. But there's all these black guys.
00:01:55 Speaker_03
Of course, they didn't call them black guys. And oh, by the way, two white women.
00:02:00 Speaker_05
We have white women and young black men together on a train. The station master at Stevenson Depot calls ahead to the Paint Rock station.
00:02:09 Speaker_03
By the time they get to Paint Rock, there's anywhere from 100 to 150 men, horses, ropes, waiting for the train.
00:02:23 Speaker_05
Everyone's pulled off the train. The two women say they've been raped. The nine young men, some of them just kids, 12 and 13 years old, get shipped directly to Scottsboro, which is the county seat. By the time they get there, another mob is waiting.
00:02:39 Speaker_03
And there's this wonderful Atticus Finch moment in this story where the sheriff of Scottsboro, Matt Wyant, comes out with his with his shotgun and says the first one that tries to cross me is going to get their head blown off.
00:02:55 Speaker_03
And that apparently held the crowd back a little bit because I guess they believed him. And two weeks later on April 6 and three hours after they met their attorney, the trial started.
00:03:16 Speaker_05
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the ninth episode in our series about Hitler's Olympics, the games behind the games.
00:03:30 Speaker_05
We've spent the last eight episodes exploring the many rationalizations, self-justifications, and delusions triggered by the Berlin Olympics. Berlin kicked off cognitive dissonance on an international scale.
00:03:44 Speaker_05
Hitler's wave of anti-Semitism focused the world's attention on Germany. But in 1931, something happened across the ocean from Germany that held the world's attention in the same way. The Scottsboro Boys trial.
00:04:00 Speaker_05
In this, our series finale, let's turn the clock back to 1931. The Scottsboro trial was a farce. There was no evidence of rape, and one of the women would later retract her accusation. Neither fact made a difference.
00:04:21 Speaker_01
Nine Negro youths are hurriedly arrested, promptly marched off to Scottsboro for trial. Six days later, they are indicted on charges of assault. Seven of them are sentenced by Justice John C. Anderson.
00:04:32 Speaker_04
To hang by the neck until dead.
00:04:37 Speaker_01
The subsequent motion for a new trial is overruled as the Alabama Supreme Court affirms the convictions.
00:04:43 Speaker_05
This kind of thing had been happening in the South for years, but something about Scottsboro and the brazenness of all-white juries saying, guilty, guilty, guilty, really touched a nerve.
00:04:54 Speaker_01
Thousands of telegrams pour into Alabama from all over the world, asserting that the Negroes had been denied a fair trial. The case is finally carried to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court of the United States.
00:05:07 Speaker_05
There was public pressure. There were appeals, retrials.
00:05:11 Speaker_01
Everybody's writing about it. Everybody knows the Scottsboro Boys.
00:05:24 Speaker_03
People were starting to have radios in their house, but it's just remarkable how fast the word did spread on this.
00:05:31 Speaker_05
Reedy was sitting inside the old church as we spoke, and behind him, there was a poster. It was a list of names linked in some way to the public campaign to get justice for the Scottsboro Boys.
00:05:42 Speaker_05
There was Ida B. Wells, the great African American activist, Jimmy Cagney, one of the biggest names in Hollywood, and then Albert Einstein.
00:05:51 Speaker_03
Einstein was in Germany when they arrested, and he, in the summer of 1931, wrote a letter with a bunch of German scientists to the Governor Miller saying, well, they were intellectuals, they called them, so German intellectuals demand the release of the Scottsboro Boys, because they're innocent.
00:06:15 Speaker_05
And Einstein is like, physicist living in Germany who is somehow so moved by the press accounts of this. Two years before Hitler became chancellor, thousands of Germans were out in the streets protesting American white supremacy.
00:06:38 Speaker_03
And they had people throwing rocks through the American embassy with notes taped onto them that was to say, they shall not die. And that is why Ben and I were in Scottsboro.
00:06:49 Speaker_00
I remember when you sent me an email with one line and it was like, we're going to do an episode on Scottsboro. And I was like, why would we talk about Scottsboro? And then I realized what year it was and what happened the year after.
00:07:03 Speaker_05
Oh, right. 1932, an Olympic year as well. And where were those games held? I think you can guess where this is headed.
00:07:28 Speaker_05
In April of 1923, a real estate developer from California named Billy Garland traveled to Rome for the annual meeting of the International Olympic Committee. Garland was good friends with Avery Brundage.
00:07:42 Speaker_05
They were cut from the same cloth, men from humble beginnings with outsized ambition, dreamers, builders. But where Brundage was grim and angry, with a chip on his shoulder the size of Lake Michigan, Garland was all sunny optimism and charm.
00:07:58 Speaker_05
Billy, everyone called him Billy, had life force. Billy grew up poor and married money. Billy was the embodiment of Los Angeles, a city in the 1920s, half a million strong and growing by the day, a city on the verge of stardom.
00:08:14 Speaker_05
Billy watched the sunrise every morning over the San Bernardino Mountains, but never bothered to look to see if it's set at night.
00:08:23 Speaker_04
L.A. was really controlled and run by a coterie of a shadow government comprised of bankers, financiers, but really above all, the real estate men. of which Billy Garland was premier, the prince of realtors.
00:08:47 Speaker_05
Billy owned huge swaths of downtown Los Angeles. His best friend was the publisher of the LA Times, the most powerful man in the city. His brothers in the shadow government kept out of the spotlight.
00:08:59 Speaker_04
Not Billy. Billy was the front man. A very outgoing personality, making speeches, arriving at the railroad station, press conferences, writing columns of his own for the LA Times. Always, always promoting. Promoting the city, promoting the future.
00:09:26 Speaker_05
So in 1923, Billy sails to Italy for his biggest pitch yet, to the International Olympic Committee. The IOC was meeting that year in the old Capitol building across from the Forum, a venue worthy of a group obsessed with antiquity.
00:09:43 Speaker_05
To start the day, the King of Italy said a few words. Then the King is opening things and like, here's this guy from, I mean, from what their perspective must have been the middle of nowhere.
00:09:56 Speaker_04
Absolutely. They literally were asking him where Los Angeles is. What's his Trump card? Hollywood. By that time, Hollywood films were, you know, widely popular all around the world. And that's one of the things he was asked at that meeting is, is L.A.
00:10:19 Speaker_04
anywhere near Hollywood? And Billy was smart enough to say, yes, L.A. is a suburb of Hollywood.
00:10:26 Speaker_05
He understood that that glamour, the emerging glamour of the region could play to his advantage. Yes. Yeah. I'm just thinking back to the IOC though, because the IOC really is, it's like every fated aristocrat in Europe is. Yes.
00:10:43 Speaker_05
Every fuddy-duddy you can find with their wax mustache is around the table. and then this kind of charismatic, wide-open, extroverted Californian shows up. I'm just imagining, it's such a fantastic scene.
00:11:01 Speaker_04
I've imagined it too, and I think that's part of how he was effective. I mean, he was a breath of fresh air. He knew how to talk to them. The idea, when he rose to give his talk, his pitch,
00:11:16 Speaker_04
he's pitching America, he's pitching the culture of America, which is strange and exotic to them.
00:11:23 Speaker_05
They're there amidst all of this sort of 18th century grandeur, and the American stands up and says, there's this brand new country across the ocean, you guys need to go there next.
00:11:37 Speaker_04
And that's exactly, that's sort of exactly how he put it, too.
00:11:44 Speaker_05
He says, if the games are to be truly international in character, they must also be held in other parts of the universe. The Olympics should come to Los Angeles. The room is silent. No one says a word. Then one delicate stands up and says, so moved.
00:12:05 Speaker_05
Let us take our beloved creation to the shores of the Pacific. Someone else seconds the motion. It goes to a vote. It carries unanimously. The whole group celebrated at the Coronal Palace, home to the country's royal family.
00:12:21 Speaker_05
Billy spotted a bald man speaking passionately to a group of onlookers. It was Mussolini, the newly installed fascist leader of Italy. Billy wandered over, shook his hand. The next day, Billy had an audience with Pope Pius XI at the Vatican.
00:12:37 Speaker_05
Pius said how much he believed in the Olympic tradition, and Billy kissed his ring. Billy convinces the IOC to bring its temple of human idealism to the United States.
00:12:51 Speaker_05
And just as the whole dazzling spectacle is about to launch, nine black kids in Northern Alabama get swept up in a miscarriage of justice so outrageous that it sparks a wave of protest around the world.
00:13:05 Speaker_05
Marches in Germany, South Africa, Cuba, and the world finds itself in the same position as it would four years later on the eve of the Berlin Olympics. contemplating a pure competition in an impure place.
00:13:21 Speaker_05
With one difference, no one ever threatened to boycott the Los Angeles Games.
00:13:26 Speaker_07
Mr. President, in the name of the President of the United States, I proclaim open the Olympic Games of Los Angeles, celebrating the 10th Olympiad of the modern era.
00:13:51 Speaker_00
So if the world is upset about Scottsboro in 1931, then why is there not a boycott of the L.A. Games in 32?
00:13:59 Speaker_05
I think, you know, the obvious reason is the nature of American transgressions in civil rights. are on the surface so different from the nature of Nazi transgressions. American transgressions are 300 years old.
00:14:19 Speaker_05
They're embedded in the kind of culture of the country. And I can't stress this enough. They involve black people.
00:14:29 Speaker_05
And it's just, it is simply the case and continues to be the case in some sense that a transgression against a black person is not considered the same as a transgression against a white person.
00:14:40 Speaker_00
Part of the difference is that Nazism is a new thing, whereas what's happening in Alabama is just not new at all.
00:14:46 Speaker_05
Yeah. What's important is it's because it wasn't it wasn't a one-off, right? Why does America get, go up in the black community in particular, get so up in arms about George Floyd? Because it had happened too many times, right?
00:15:01 Speaker_05
And Scott's book is kind of like that. There's been this steady drumbeat of this kind of stuff coming out of the South. And then it's, you know, the world seizes on that because they're like, You can't keep doing this.
00:15:15 Speaker_05
It wasn't system malfunction, it was system function. And that's a lot more kind of outrageous. I don't think you can make sense of what happened with the Scottsboro Boys unless you take a step back and look at the Alabama Constitution.
00:15:30 Speaker_05
I mean, look at the kind of legal infrastructure that was in place in Alabama at the time. So why did the L.A. Games escape moral scrutiny? It's puzzling.
00:15:42 Speaker_05
Maybe it's as simple as the fact that the world holds America to a different standard than everyone else. If you're a young upstart of a country, you get away with more.
00:15:52 Speaker_05
Or maybe the world cares less about crimes against Black people than it does about crimes against white people.
00:15:58 Speaker_05
Or maybe the Nazis were making the Olympics so much about Nazism that it was really easy to see the contradiction between the Games and its host, in a way that didn't seem as obvious with the LA Olympics. Or maybe it's all three.
00:16:14 Speaker_05
But Scottsboro was not some strange outlying event. It touched a raw nerve because people understood that it was typical. It was how the South worked. Discrimination was baked right into American law.
00:16:29 Speaker_05
I called up a law professor at the University of Alabama, Susan Hamill, and the first thing she brought up was Alabama's state constitution at the time, which had been rewritten in 1901 with one thing in mind.
00:16:41 Speaker_02
There was no doubt. as to what the intent was.
00:16:49 Speaker_05
As one delegate said, they were driven by, quote, the necessity of relieving the black belt of the incubus resting on it. Another delegate was more blunt.
00:17:00 Speaker_02
We are here to get rid of the N-I-G-G-E-R
00:17:05 Speaker_05
The 15th Amendment to the US Constitution bars states from denying people the right to vote. So the framers of the Alabama Constitution devised a bunch of workarounds. First, a poll tax. You had to pay $1.50 to vote, which was a lot of money back then.
00:17:21 Speaker_05
Right there, you've gotten rid of a lot of sharecroppers. But they kept going, adding every obstacle they could think of.
00:17:28 Speaker_02
They had to own property. There were literacy tests. And there was the overall discretion of the white voting registrars. The voting registrars, in terms of who was actually registering folks, had a great deal of discretion.
00:17:50 Speaker_02
If you had a white person that kind of met the requirements, but also maybe didn't, they could get waved through.
00:17:58 Speaker_05
The 1901 Alabama Constitution would end up being the longest constitution in the world—388,882 words, about 850 times longer than the U.S. Constitution.
00:18:14 Speaker_02
when African-Americans went to register after the 1901 Constitution was ratified, they were just turned away.
00:18:22 Speaker_05
In 1900, there were 181,471 African-American men of voting age. After the Constitution, fewer than 3,000 of those men could vote.
00:18:35 Speaker_02
You know, we did not have a black electorate in this state worth speaking of until the 1970s.
00:18:44 Speaker_05
It gets worse. In 1902, a black janitor named Jackson Giles files suit against the state. Jackson says, I meet all the requirements. I can read. I understand the Constitution. I paid my poll tax. I own property. But they still won't let me vote.
00:19:02 Speaker_05
The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court in 1903, where, rotting for the majority, the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the greatest legal minds the Supreme Court has ever produced, writes, and I'm not making this up,
00:19:17 Speaker_05
The defendant, Mr. Jackson, alleges that the state of Alabama has constructed a voting system that is in open violation of the Constitution of the U.S.
00:19:28 Speaker_05
But he is asking to be registered to vote under the very same rules that he says are in open violation of the Constitution of the United States. If we rule in his favor, we are complicit in the violation.
00:19:43 Speaker_05
It's one of the all-time great Supreme Court catch-22s.
00:19:48 Speaker_02
Justice Holmes disingenuously said, oh, if Jackson Giles wants a remedy, he needs to seek his member of Congress to do something about it. But Jackson Giles had been denied the right to vote for any member of Congress.
00:20:06 Speaker_05
Mr. Giles, if you don't like the system that keeps you from voting, then vote to change it.
00:20:12 Speaker_02
The U.S. Supreme Court like the rest of the country, just wanted to wash their hands of, if I can put it this way, the dirty South.
00:20:24 Speaker_05
Now we can understand what happened in Scottsboro. The jury pool in Alabama is drawn from the voting pool. And since the voters are basically all white, then the juries are all white.
00:20:36 Speaker_05
Which means that when nine black kids are accused of some bogus crime on the Chattanooga to Memphis train, those nine kids are out of luck.
00:20:45 Speaker_05
All told, the Scottsboro Boys would end up serving more than 100 years behind bars for something that never happened. And in Giles v. Harris, the Supreme Court of the United States signs off on the whole arrangement.
00:21:01 Speaker_05
And what, so do you study that case in law school in Alabama?
00:21:06 Speaker_02
No. Isn't that a shame?
00:21:10 Speaker_05
Scottsboro was an embarrassment, an outrage, exposing the very dark heart of the country that was about to host the purest of athletic spectacles.
00:21:22 Speaker_05
If the world shouldn't have gone to Berlin in 1936 for moral reasons, then the world shouldn't have gone to Los Angeles in 1932 either. Where can you go?
00:21:41 Speaker_05
In the lead up to the Berlin Games, a group known as the Jewish Labor Committee set out to solve the problem of what to do about impure places and pure competitions.
00:21:51 Speaker_05
The organizers were the same people who had been up in arms over the Scottsboro Boys four years earlier, who helped fund their legal defense, who were fighting for the rights of working Americans. Their hands were clean.
00:22:04 Speaker_05
They called their games the World Labor Athletic Carnival. It was held in New York City on Randall's Island in August of 1936, overlapping with the last two days of the Berlin Olympics. Invitations went out.
00:22:19 Speaker_05
The carnival will function as a show of protest against the iron heel of Nazism. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia signed up to be co-chair. The governor of New York agreed to hand out prizes.
00:22:31 Speaker_05
Proceeds from the event will go to supporting the anti-Nazi movement and, eventually, to helping Jews escape from Eastern Europe. The labor games represent the first solution to the dilemma of the Olympics.
00:22:44 Speaker_05
Carve out a little corner of ideological purity. Don't compromise. Align your political values with the ethic of amateur sport. Be an absolutist. Ed Gordon was there. He was the winner of the long jump in the 1932 Olympics.
00:23:01 Speaker_05
George Verhof, the so-called jumping janitor, was there too. His gold medal jump beat the winning mark in Berlin by a full inch and a half. The women's 40-yard dash was won by a member of the dressmakers' union, Wanda Olszewska.
00:23:15 Speaker_05
Another Olszewska, Mitzi, competed with her on the winning relay team. When a reporter asked Missy how she trained, she responded, oh, picketing and throwing stones through windows. And nobody came to watch. The stands were half empty. Why?
00:23:35 Speaker_05
Well, the games were supposed to draw their support from the labor movement, but the Jewish Labor Committee was an anti-communist socialist group, so some communists felt left out and stayed home.
00:23:47 Speaker_05
Then came a second disagreement, this time between the American Socialist Party, the old guard, and some upstart progressives led by Norman Thomas. Let me just read to you from A History of the Labor Games by Edward Shapiro.
00:24:03 Speaker_05
The struggle came to a head at the party's annual convention in 1936 in Cleveland, when the old guard left the party, took the magazine The New Leader with them, and created the Social Democratic Federation.
00:24:17 Speaker_05
The new leader viewed Randall's Island as virtually a New York Social Democratic Federation event, copiously discussing its progress from its inception in May to the games themselves in August.
00:24:29 Speaker_05
The pro-Norman Thomas socialist call, in contrast, merely printed a pro-forma announcement of the games. More to its liking was a track and gymnastic demonstration on July 4, 1936, in Taberville, Ohio, near Cleveland.
00:24:45 Speaker_05
sponsored by the Czechoslovak Socialist Federation of America, the Czechoslovak Labor Gymnastic Union, the American Workingmen's Circle of New York, the Workingmen's Gymnastic Association, and the Workers' Sports League of America.
00:25:01 Speaker_05
This is the problem with the pursuit of purity. At a certain point, it starts to get absurd. Because the communists get upset at the socialists, and then the socialists get upset at each other.
00:25:13 Speaker_05
And sooner or later, your athletic spectacle that was intended to showcase the greatest talent in the world is in Taberville, Ohio, under the aegis of the Czechoslovak Socialist Federation of America.
00:25:27 Speaker_05
I mean, with all due respect to the Czechoslovak Socialist Federation of America, who wants to watch that? So what's the solution? Option two. Take that absolutism down a notch. Be willing to compromise.
00:25:47 Speaker_05
Remember Charles Sherrill, the American delegate who fought so hard for America to stay in the Berlin Olympics?
00:25:53 Speaker_05
Just before the games, someone sent him a news clipping about the killing of a Jewish footballer who had apparently been dragged off the field by Nazis in the middle of a match.
00:26:03 Speaker_05
Sheryl wrote back, your September 23 letter about the Prague press story of a Jewish football player killed at Radispore, Silesia arrived today. If true, it is as bad as Negro lynchings in our South. Sheryl had ideals.
00:26:23 Speaker_05
He was perfectly willing to compromise around the edges. Yes, The American South is a nasty place, but so what? Show me a country without nasty places. You have to hold a pure competition in an impure place because there aren't any pure places.
00:26:41 Speaker_05
Here's how Sheryl finishes the letter. Answering your clipping, let me ask you what you would have said if any foreign team had boycotted our Los Angeles 1932 games because of our Negro lynchings in the South. Oh right, the endless boycott.
00:26:58 Speaker_05
Ben and I thought about this.
00:27:03 Speaker_00
that probably if you boycott 36, you also have to boycott 32. And then you're looking at there is no Olympics in 1940 because it was planned for Tokyo. And then obviously World War II cancels that and not in 44 either.
00:27:15 Speaker_00
So then that's a huge stretch of time. It's what, what is that? It's 20 years, 20 years without Olympics, 28 to 48. So could the Olympic movement have survived 20 years of no Olympics? Probably not.
00:27:30 Speaker_05
Yeah. So it starts to seem like you can only keep the Olympics alive at a cost. After the Berlin Games, the Germans put out a report, and there's a quote on the title page. It goes like this. Signed, Adolf Hitler.
00:28:08 Speaker_05
That's where you end up when you casually mix the pure and impure, your ideals in the mouth of a monster. Idealism does not survive the journey to an impure place. So where does all this confusion leave you? Option three, Billy Garland.
00:28:35 Speaker_05
In the fall of 1918, Los Angeles was in a rough patch. The war in Europe was taking its toll on the economy. The 1918 flu, which had claimed millions of lives around the world, had shut down the city streets.
00:28:49 Speaker_05
Tourism, the great lifeblood of Los Angeles, was at a standstill. Billy Garland and his friends needed a plan to get the city back on track. So Billy calls a meeting in his office, gathers together the power brokers.
00:29:03 Speaker_04
They were meeting there basically to try to figure out ways to promote Los Angeles, above all to avoid future lulls in business. And somewhere in that meeting came up the idea of bidding for and staging the Olympics as a way to put L.A.
00:29:24 Speaker_04
on the map and draw investors.
00:29:28 Speaker_05
The third way to resolve the dilemma of the Olympic Games is just to be a realist. You say, whatever, let's not complicate things. The games are really useful. And if we play our cards right, we can all get rich. So Billy got his games.
00:29:45 Speaker_05
Here he is announcing them.
00:29:47 Speaker_06
Conceived in the spirit of the purest sportsmanship, dozen and one-half centuries or more before Christ, these Olympic Games are the day the one living heritage handed down to us from those distant times.
00:30:02 Speaker_05
Billy didn't write those lines, believe me. Someone at IOC headquarters in Switzerland did, but I'm guessing this is the part Billy did write.
00:30:12 Speaker_06
Many thousands of visitors to these games will come to Los Angeles and California from all parts of the globe and from every portion of our country. Let me add that California recognizes her responsibility as host. The stranger within her gates
00:30:27 Speaker_06
will be treated to that cordial hospitality and welcome so traditional of our wonderful state.
00:30:34 Speaker_05
Bring the kids! Stay at one of my hotels!
00:30:36 Speaker_06
Come then, to California, host of the world for the 16-day period beginning on July 30th, to witness for yourselves the ultimate and highest manifestation of modern sportsmanship known to mankind.
00:30:55 Speaker_05
Billy builds a magnificent stadium, the Coliseum, just south of downtown. He builds the first true athlete's village up in Baldwin Hills.
00:31:04 Speaker_05
Billy recruits the two biggest movie stars of the day, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, to be his spokespeople. Billy creates a spectacle. Billy even makes a profit on the games, a million dollars.
00:31:18 Speaker_05
A few years later, Billy would be all in favor of the Olympics in Berlin, but not because he performed some elaborate political analysis. Please, more like, love the Kaiserhof Hotel. Can we have one in Hollywood?
00:31:31 Speaker_05
How much do the Nazis look to 32 for kind of inspiration on, I mean, they take that kind of, that notion of the games as a spectacle. and run with it.
00:31:44 Speaker_04
They were inspired by the 32 Olympics very much so. The 32 Olympics were a model for them in that way. Billy Garland and his gang showed them the way.
00:31:58 Speaker_05
There was a point deep into this series where I found myself more and more sympathetic to Billy Garland, to the guy who just made things work. Ben never went that far. We argued about it.
00:32:10 Speaker_05
I started this whole investigation way back when, believing that we should have boycotted in 36. Now, I'm not sure I agree. And now I think I'm glad we went.
00:32:27 Speaker_05
Everyone involved in this debate back then and everyone involved in debate like this today, the core of all of it is everyone takes sports really, really, really, really, really, really seriously.
00:32:38 Speaker_05
And I kind of realized halfway through that I'm one of those people.
00:32:42 Speaker_00
you're a person who thinks sports really matter.
00:32:44 Speaker_05
Yeah, I didn't think I was. I was like, I thought I was the guy who said, why are we spending all this time and attention arguing about, you know, running a race against each other?
00:32:55 Speaker_05
And then I'm like, wait a minute, I am that person who cares passionately about the people running a race against each other.
00:32:59 Speaker_00
With your foil, me as a person, it's just sort of like on a able to recognize even an Olympic level runner.
00:33:07 Speaker_05
And so like, you know, the question we have to ask ourselves is, if we want to boycott in 36, do we want, do we really want an Olympics? Because the only way to have an Olympics is to, is to hold your nose from time to time.
00:33:21 Speaker_05
And I realized, Oh, actually, I think I'm, I think I would be willing to hold my nose.
00:33:25 Speaker_00
I think though, I feel in some ways like the less intellectually curious member of this team because I started feeling like we should boycott the 1936 games and I still feel like we shouldn't have gone to the 1936 games.
00:33:41 Speaker_00
So I don't know what I was really investigating then having not, I guess, maybe just like to confirm my position. I think if you think sports and the Olympics really matter, which admittedly, I do love the Olympics, but I'm not that person.
00:33:56 Speaker_00
I think if you think sports really, really, really matter, then it's even more incumbent on you to boycott the 1936 Olympics. Because the myth that everyone buys into is that this is a festival celebrating the best of what makes us human.
00:34:12 Speaker_00
Everybody's going to come together and try their their hardest and have a defining moment of their life in a place with a government that can then catch all of that moral authority and beauty and excellence and put it in the service of their own project, which is the defilement of what it is to be a person like one of the most inhumane things in the 20th century.
00:34:34 Speaker_00
So if you really think that sports matters that much, then I think it's incumbent on you to not lend it to that project. And not all, in a way this is just a false question because the IOC 100% could have moved the Olympics.
00:34:50 Speaker_05
Yeah. So, I am incredibly skeptical of the idea that a boycott of Berlin would have in any way have accelerated our opposition to Nazism. My guess is the opposite would have happened, that we would have said, okay,
00:35:08 Speaker_05
We've said our piece, we don't like the man, and we're not gonna go and participate in his little games.
00:35:14 Speaker_05
And like, it strikes me you could make a completely alternate scenario that just allows the Germans to feel like, okay, the rest of the world is like... That's you guys don't like what we're doing.
00:35:25 Speaker_05
We're just going to go off on, you know, be even worse. I don't know. I'm not. I'm just not. I don't buy that premise about I never bought that premise about symbolic acts of protest.
00:35:36 Speaker_00
But don't you think that the record shows that having the Olympics in Berlin in 36 is helpful to the Nazis? Like Goebbels says, this is a really big breakthrough for us. And foreign currency floods into the country.
00:35:48 Speaker_05
They're happy that they got away with it. Yeah. But, Ben, on the scale of things that were happening in the 1930s that had an effect on the progress of Nazism, this is so far down the list.
00:36:01 Speaker_00
Yeah, you're right. But I still feel like the boycott makes sense. And I agree, it's incredibly low down on the list of things that you should do in the 1930s to combat Nazism. But, like, why wouldn't you do all the things?
00:36:13 Speaker_05
Like, it makes sense to do... But we're not doing any of the other things. We're not doing the other things. This is why I get so, I lose patience with this kind of precious view of our moral responsibilities, because it misses the point.
00:36:30 Speaker_05
If you spend more than five minutes taking a look at the way that Dorothy Thompson does and examining what's going on there, you realize this is a deeply evil man who we need to do something about, right? Something real about.
00:36:43 Speaker_05
And my point is, Boycotting the Games is not real. It's just, I'm sorry, it's a substitute for actual behavior.
00:36:53 Speaker_00
But it doesn't need to be a substitute. It's a substitute if you take that action in bad faith.
00:36:58 Speaker_05
But I think any kind of useful reading of human nature suggests that nine times out of 10, symbolic actions discharge our responsibility. They don't turbocharge them.
00:37:09 Speaker_00
I 100% agree with that. However, what is the connection between the daily reality that most of us live and the systems level action?
00:37:19 Speaker_00
And the answer can't be that there is no connection, that one of these things happens in like the ether and the other one happens on the ground and we can do whatever we want on the ground because the thing is in the ether is going to take care of itself.
00:37:31 Speaker_00
Like there is some obscure bridge between those two levels of existence. And it might be that you yourself run for office and then try and change things. But like that isn't the only way you can affect these issues. And one of the ways, plausibly,
00:37:47 Speaker_00
Many boycotts, absolute nonsense. A boycott of the 36 games based on what the Olympics do for the Nazis, like that one probably would have meant something.
00:37:55 Speaker_00
There are two sets of morally disingenuous actions, one that actually happened and one that we're describing that could have happened.
00:38:01 Speaker_00
And I would just prefer that one, the one of not going maybe for like complicated reasons and then hope that it puts the right kind of pressure on this sort of ethereal systems level realm, which is not taking the action it needs to do.
00:38:18 Speaker_05
Ben and I do not agree. Three options. Absolutism, soft idealism, realism. Are you going to fight, compromise, or shrug? Is your true north Dorothy Thompson, Avery Brundage, or Billy Garland?
00:38:39 Speaker_05
The absolutists end up in Taborville, playing to an empty stadium. The quasi-idealists end up with Hitler, stealing their thunder.
00:38:47 Speaker_05
And the realists give us the games, but with so much Coca-Cola and Memorial T-shirts and mixed-use urban construction that we forget why we wanted the Olympics in the first place.
00:39:07 Speaker_05
The last interview Ben and I did for this series was in Los Angeles, at UCLA, with Millon Tiff, that wonderful triple jumper who knew Jesse Owens. It was hot, one of those hazy Los Angeles mornings. A helicopter was hovering somewhere overhead.
00:39:24 Speaker_05
We were standing on the track at Drake Stadium, right by the long jump pit. There were a handful of athletes milling about. And then a young woman came running past us.
00:39:34 Speaker_05
She was doing 200 meter intervals, halfway around the track hard with a jog recovery. Around and around and around. And she was magical. Ben's not a track and field obsessive like I am. I wanted Ben to see what I was seeing.
00:39:52 Speaker_05
When you see how beautiful runners are, I don't think she's going to run for us, but you see her sprinting, it's just like, it's just like unlike any running you, I don't know who she is, but she's a real runner. Did you watch her run? She's gorgeous.
00:40:06 Speaker_05
She was flying. Most people have seen runners at high school track meets or maybe world-class athletes on television. But to really appreciate this kind of performance,
00:40:18 Speaker_05
You have to witness it in real life, up close, like we were, at eye level, five feet away. Then you can see the full beauty of what a human being can do, propelling themselves with such elegance and effortlessness.
00:40:32 Speaker_05
Just the tap, tap, tap of their shoes landing lightly on the track. You can just tell when someone's... I don't know who she is. Then Milan Tiff said, that's Sydney McLachlan. Sydney McLachlan!
00:40:48 Speaker_05
Sydney McLaughlin-Lavrone, two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 400 meter hurdles, the world record holder, one of the greatest sprinters in history. We walked towards her.
00:41:00 Speaker_05
I felt the way an art student would feel if they randomly ran into Picasso on the street. No, that's not quite right.
00:41:06 Speaker_05
I felt the way an art student would feel if they stumbled across some amazing painting at a garage sale, stared at it in awe, and then realized, it's a Picasso. We were standing right next to her, so I started to whisper to try and play it cool.
00:41:22 Speaker_05
For some reason I thought she was much taller. She's one of the greatest female athletes of like,
00:41:29 Speaker_05
I mean, I can't believe it didn't ever occur to me that it was... Ben and I had spent months trying to solve the moral puzzle presented by the Berlin Olympics, trying to see clearly through the fog of 1936. First, should we go?
00:41:44 Speaker_05
And then, more importantly, if you have ideals, how do you hold on to them in an ugly, messy world?
00:41:52 Speaker_05
And that day at the UCLA track, by some miraculous twist of fate, we got a glimpse of the sublime, gliding past us, clear as day, close enough to touch, showing us the way. We will have many more arguments in the future, just as we had in 1936.
00:42:18 Speaker_05
We continue to live in a very impure place, and we should have those arguments. That's our job, to engage with what is difficult, to try and pick a safe path through the minefield.
00:42:31 Speaker_05
But the epiphany I had as Sidney McLachlan swept past us is that we need to be clear about what we're arguing for. Charles Sherrill was protecting some archaic notion of amateurism. Avery Brundage was furthering his own ambitions.
00:42:48 Speaker_05
Jesse Owens was navigating the impossible complexity of life as a black man. Billy Garland just wanted to build stuff. Altogether, they loaded up the Olympic movement with so much excess baggage that it's a miracle it didn't sink.
00:43:04 Speaker_05
And we don't need any of it. It's just getting in the way. The pure place that everyone was looking for is not a country or a city. It's a feeling. It's the awe that comes from watching someone perform an athletic feat better and faster than anyone else.
00:43:22 Speaker_08
race to the line. Sydney McLaughlin is bringing it to Dalilah Muhammad. Muhammad's trying to hold on. McLaughlin on the inside to the line. It's going to be Sydney's time again. And it's a world record again. McLaughlin 51.47.
00:43:49 Speaker_05
Revisionist History is produced by Ben Nadaf-Haffrey, Tali Emlin, and Nina Byrd-Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz and J.L. Goldfein. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Sarah Bruguier and Jake Gorski.
00:44:05 Speaker_05
Engineering by Nina Byrd-Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen Shikurji. Additional thanks to Michael Yashinsky, Meredith Rollins, Michael Spector, and Michael Linton.
00:44:20 Speaker_05
At Pushkin, special thanks to Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, Eric Sandler, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Nicole Opdenbosch, and Brian Shrebenick, Christina Sullivan, Carrie Brody, and Greta Cohen. I'm Malcolm Graupow.