Bow Down to Washington

“Bow Down to Washington” is a school song that accompanies the Washington crew from exuberant mischief on the road to celebration in Berlin. Its repeated appearances make it more than background music: sung by the boys and played at the finish of a major race, it becomes an audible sign of collective identity, linking the crew’s private camaraderie to the public pride attached to Washington rowing.

A song within a rowing culture

In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate crew drew crowds and press coverage on a scale comparable to baseball and college football. Fans followed teams through their training and racing seasons, while major regattas attracted national attention. In the West, interest gathered especially around the longstanding rivalry between the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington. Their annual April races brought together students, alumni, and citizens to watch the two large public universities compete for regional standing.

That sporting culture gives the song’s refrain a specific setting. The Washington crew represented a university whose rowing program had worked for recognition beyond the West Coast, in a sport still dominated by the prestige of Eastern colleges. The song’s title names Washington as the object of homage; when the crew sings it together, the words can function as a compact declaration of which institution the boys belong to. The evidence does not establish that every performance was a formal rally or that the song was used only for ceremonial occasions. Instead, its recurrence places school affiliation inside ordinary moments as well as public ones.

The train as a stage for team identity

On the journey east, the crew’s first recorded performance is part of a prank. As the Empire Builder crossed Montana and entered North Dakota, the boys filled balloons with water in a lavatory, stood on the platforms between coaches, and threw the balloons at targets along the route: grazing cows, cars waiting at railroad crossings, and dogs sleeping on station platforms. After each barrage they broke into a chorus of “Bow Down to Washington” as the train passed.

The sequence makes the song a punctuation mark for the boys’ collective escapade. Its refrain follows each act of mischief, converting a series of scattered targets into a shared performance by the traveling crew. The railway platforms and the moving train provide a fleeting audience; the boys answer the startled scenes they leave behind with a song that identifies them as a group. The school name is thus carried beyond campus and racecourse, across the landscape in a moment of youthful rowdiness.

From private chorus to public victory

The song’s later appearances give it a different scale without changing its communal function. At the finish of the Washington crew’s race against California, boat whistles sounded, an observation-train locomotive wailed, and thousands of spectators roared as the Husky Clipper crossed the line three lengths ahead of the California Clipper. The Washington boat set a course record of 15:56.4, beating the previous mark by 37 seconds. In the launch, Al Ulbrickson listened as the band aboard the Chippewa played “Bow Down to Washington.”

The scene moves the refrain from the boys’ informal chorus into the soundscape of a public sporting triumph. It accompanies a victory over a formidable California crew, but the coach’s response remains cautious: Washington had beaten California at the Pacific Coast Regatta in two successive years, only to lose in Poughkeepsie afterward. The song could celebrate the moment without settling what came next. Its brightness therefore sits beside uncertainty about whether the crew’s success would hold through the next tests.

Recurrence in Berlin

In Berlin, the song again belongs to the boys’ life together off the water. While anxious about their rowing form in the cold, rough conditions on the Langer See, they continued to explore the city, eat together, drink beer, and sing “Bow Down to Washington.” Its return amid unsettled preparation places familiar team identity against the pressure of approaching preliminary races. The song does not erase their concerns; it marks one of the ways they remained a company away from the shell.

After the Olympic victory, the crew’s singing carried into the early morning. While the other boys went out, Joe Rantz stayed behind; the journal record notes that the group encountered trouble and later returned to Köpenick with hangovers. By four thirty, they were walking through central Berlin with their arms over one another’s shoulders, singing the song. Joe’s absence distinguishes his private reckoning with the gold medal from the team’s public celebration, but the refrain once more gathers the other boys into a recognizable whole. Across the train journey, the racecourse, and Berlin, “Bow Down to Washington” recurs wherever the crew’s shared identity is being enacted—sometimes in mischief, sometimes amid uncertainty, and finally in celebration.