Power Games. Jules BoykoffЧитать онлайн книгу.
Pickford, and Will Rogers.65
According to the Olympics scholar Alan Tomlinson, the 1932 Games signaled “a markedly political intensification of the event.”66 They were being put on during the Great Depression, and organizers took care not to stage the Games in a lavish manner while the world writhed in economic pain. Organizers made prudent use of existing buildings and structures. They downplayed the incipient commercialism of the Olympics while at the same time embracing it. The Official Report claimed that “not a single note of commercialism was allowed to permeate the consummation” of Olympism, but organizers quietly lined up sponsorship and service-provision deals.67 Such commercial pacts eventually became an integral part of the political-economic architecture of the Games.
Yet commercial contributions were meager compared to the enormous public funding that underwrote the Games. In 1927 the California legislature passed the California Tenth Olympiad Bond Act, which supplied $1 million to the Olympic cause, and the measure was ratified in a public referendum by a one-million-vote majority. But in 1929 the US was rocked by the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. Activists took to the streets to protest spending money on the Olympic spectacle while everyday Californians were suffering. Demonstrators in Sacramento raised protest placards reading “Groceries Not Games! Olympics Are Outrageous!” Feeling the political heat, California governor James Rolph remarked, “These Games are an impossible venture. What do they want, riots?” Still, Rolph did not push to cancel the Games—he had a political career to consider, and local business heavyweights were in the Olympic corner. Jittery citizens were assured that hosting the Games would bring jobs and tourism to the city—a trope that would become standard-issue Olympic rhetoric.
In retrospect there’s little evidence that the Games buoyed the local economy. But thanks to thrift, sponsorship, high attendance, and a spike in interest from Hollywood, the Olympics earned a profit of $150,000, most of which was plunged into servicing the debt on the $1 million bond and reimbursing the city and county for the facilities they anted up for the Games.68 The city paid a quieter price when the bond market wavered on public works projects, stoking a crisis that culminated in a recall election for the mayor. The New York Times proclaimed that “the public is thoroughly ‘fed up’ on these experiments in political economy.”69 Such “experiments”—where the costs of the Olympics are socialized, with the public taking on the bulk of the risk—ultimately became the go-to move for funding the Games.
In the words of the Official Report, the Olympics survived “the depths of a dark abyss of world depression.”70 For the first time, organizers built a formal Olympic Village where visiting athletes stayed during the competition, although female athletes were segregated at the nearby Chapman Park Hotel.71 The medal ceremonies and three-tiered platform we see today made their first appearance. Organizers also condensed the Games’ duration, limiting competition days to sixteen, a tradition that has essentially continued through to the present. The shortened calendar helped focus media and public attention. Organizers enabled the media in other ways. They set up a “Press Department” in December 1929, long before the Games began, to do the work of a modern sports information office. When the Olympics arrived two and a half years later, more than 900 journalists from around the world were on hand to cover them, and the Press Office was well seasoned in its job of helping them.
Coubertin still criticized the news media’s coverage, decrying “a press campaign with bitterness of tone and an unfairness of intent equaled only by the self-interested calculation that inspired it.”72 But social science content analysis demonstrates that media coverage actually presented a neutral or positive portrayal of the Games.73 The “lizards” Coubertin claimed were bad-mouthing Olympism, “proclaiming its imminent or more gradual collapse,” were more phantom than opera.74 In fact, Olympic press officials managed the commercial media effectively, shaping the message to the organizers’ advantage.
Time magazine assessed the Games as “a gorgeous, unprecedented success.”75 The Los Angeles organizing committee was even tossed into the mix for the Nobel Peace Prize.76 Mildred “Babe” Didrikson raised the bar for women’s athletics, dazzling the assembled throngs with remarkable Olympic feats. Although she qualified for all five individual track and field events, Olympic power brokers only allowed her to compete in three. Didrikson won the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin, setting world records along the way. She also won silver in the high jump. On the flip side, after Luigi Beccali won the 1,500-meter race, he speared a fascist salute skyward as the Italian national anthem played during the award ceremony. This act was mentioned in the press, but only in passing and without analysis of its political import.77 Such scant attention to the politics of the Games would not be possible four years later.
Nazi Games
The Olympics were initially of little interest to Adolf Hitler. When the 1936 Games were awarded to Berlin in 1931, a centrist, democratic coalition held power in Germany. Even in 1932, Hitler was referring to the modern Olympics as “a plot against the Aryan race by Freemasons and Jews.”78 But propaganda minister Josef Goebbels convinced him that the Games were a prime opportunity to bathe the swastika in the Olympic glow on the world stage. Although in Mein Kampf Hitler praised boxing for the “steel-like versatility” it instilled, the Führer was no fan of sports.79 But after becoming chancellor in January 1933, Hitler supported the Olympics, even plowing significant state funds into the event.80 Hitler and Goebbels became intent on using the Olympics to demonstrate German superiority.
Hitler’s belief in the racial supremacy of the so-called Aryan race clashed intrinsically with the doctrine of inclusive-ness in the IOC’s official charter. The year before the Berlin Olympics and the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany had passed the Nuremburg Laws, formalizing policies that marginalized Jews. The IOC took a middle path. When Baillet-Latour saw anti-Semitic signage peppering the German landscape he complained vehemently to Hitler, threatening to cancel the Games. The Führer relented, ordering the signs’ removal.81 In Avery Brundage’s personal notes, he wrote, “Baillet-Latour said to Hitler ‘You keep your law, I keep my Games.’”82
Opposition to the Nazis’ racist policies emerged in the United States in 1933, when the Amateur Athletic Union voted to boycott the Games unless anti-Jewish discrimination was reversed in Germany.83 The AAU vote did not influence the group that mattered, the American Olympic Committee, which decided to participate in the Games. The decision was made after the committee chief, Avery Brundage, made a “personal investigation” into the matter and received a pledge from the German government not to discriminate against Jewish athletes.84 Nevertheless, the push to boycott the Games continued from a variety of sources, including students at Columbia College, various religious groups, and the Committee on Fair Play in Sports, a liberal organization formed specifically to oppose American participation at Berlin.85 To be sure, the United States had its own deep-seated problems with racism, but the 1936 Olympics provided a chance to point the finger away from home. In a March 1935 Gallup poll, 43 percent of respondents favored a boycott.86
Brundage’s “personal investigation” largely entailed listening to and then believing German officials. The more Brundage publicly explained his reasoning, the more flimsy it appeared. He told the New York Times: “Germany has nothing whatsoever to do with the management of the games. The Germans provide the facilities and make preliminary arrangements, but that is all.” The Olympics, he argued, was “under the sole jurisdiction” of the IOC. Plus, he added: “The fact that no Jews have been named so far to compete for Germany doesn’t necessarily mean that they have been discriminated against on that score. In forty years of Olympic history, I doubt if the number of Jewish athletes competing from all nations totaled 1 per cent of all those in the games. In fact I believe one-half of 1 per cent would be a high percentage.”87 Behind the scenes, he was more direct about his feelings. When Edström wrote Brundage to complain that “all the Jews in the whole world are attacking us,”88 Brundage responded with an accusatory screed:
The situation on this side of the Atlantic has become extremely complicated. As you no doubt know, half of the Jewish population of